and the New Learning might agree. If style was to be attended to, if rhetoric was to flourish, it might as well be applied to the great engine of popular education. The professorship at Cambridge was soon supplemented by the Lady Margaret preachership, the holder of which was to go from place to place and give a cogent example of the new style of pulpit oratory, which was ordered to be free from "cavillings about words and parade of sophistry, and was to recommend God's word to men's minds by efficacious eloquence". I need not remind you that the Lady Margaret was so well pleased with the results of her new venture that she went on to found the colleges of Christ and of St. John. Patronage had now been successfully diverted to enrich and extend the resources of the ancient seat of learning.
It must, however, be admitted that the animating motive of Fisher's endeavours was a laudable desire to raise Cambridge to the level which Oxford had already reached. The example of the early Hellenists still survived, and John Colet followed the example of his teachers, Grocyn and Linacre, in spending three years in Italy. On his return in 1496 he went to Oxford, and as a volunteer delivered a course of lectures on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, in which he abandoned the scholastic method of interpreting sentence by sentence, or word by word, and endeavoured to discover the meaning of the whole. It is most probable that the effect produced by Colet's lectures suggested to Fisher the foundation of a professorship at Cambridge, by which the new method might have a secure footing and not depend on the
