and in none that would touch his spirit more closely, than by the issue of a fine edition of his principal works (including the MS. annals of the College). For the preparation of this there are those among us well fitted, not less by veneration for his memory than by the possession of that critical scholarship which he valued so highly.
When Harvey set out on the grand tour, Italy was still the mater gloriosa studiorum; to which one hundred years earlier, so tradition says, Linacre on leaving had erected an altar. The glamour of the ideals of the Renaissance had faded somewhat since the days when John Free, an Oxford man, had made the ancient learning his own; and had so far bettered the instruction of his masters that he was welcomed as a teacher in Padua, Ferrara, and Florence. In a measure, too, the national glory had departed, dimmed amid the strife and warfare which had cost the old republics their independence. Many years earlier Fracastorius, one of our medical poets, had sung of her decadence :
- To what estate, O wretched Italy,
- Has civil strife reduc’d and moulder’d Thee!
- Where now are all thy ancient glories hurl’d?
- Where is thy boasted Empire of the world?
- What nook in Thee from barbarous Rage is freed
- And has not seen thy captive children bleed?[1]
And matters had not improved but had grown worse. In the sixteenth century Italian influence had sunk deeply into the social, professional, and commercial life of England, more deeply, indeed, than we appreciate;[2] and it was not for a generation or two later that the candlesticks were removed, from the Cisalpine towns to
