The life of Thomas Linacre : Doctor of Medicine, physician to King Henry VIII; the tutor and friend of Sir Thomas More, and the founder of the college of physicians in London : with memoirs of his contemporaries, and of the rise and progress of learning, more particularly of the schools from the ninth to the sixteenth century inclusive / by John Noble Johnson ; edited by Robert Graves.

  • Johnson, John Noble, 1787-1823.
Date:
1835
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The life of Thomas Linacre : Doctor of Medicine, physician to King Henry VIII; the tutor and friend of Sir Thomas More, and the founder of the college of physicians in London : with memoirs of his contemporaries, and of the rise and progress of learning, more particularly of the schools from the ninth to the sixteenth century inclusive / by John Noble Johnson ; edited by Robert Graves. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    appointment. Three years of useless argument and opposition were consumed in prescribing the mode of tea9hing^ till. thjD, virulerxce of the con- tending parties was cur^,ejd o,Aly,,l))^. the royal pre- sence. The king determined these disputes in person, and exliorted their authors to peace and learning and arts flourished in Britain as early as the siege of Troy, no works have reached posterity by which their merits might be weighed, and the existence of Brute, the Trojan, and his literary followers, is found only in the chronicles of monks, and in the early records of their ecclesiastical institutions. The pretended skill of Bladud, king of Britain, in magic and mathe- matics, his studies at Athens, and his university at Stamford, the prototype of all similar and succeeding institutions, rest on no other foundation than the metrical history of John Harding and the historical fables of his informer, Merlinus Caledonius. Whatever advances in learning were made by the Britons during the dominion of the Romans, and the writings of their conqueror bear testimony to the generosity of their tempers and their ca- pacity for receiving instruction, it must be evident that, like all savage nations almost separated from communication with the civilized world, they were unacquainted with any ancient lan- guage beyond the few expressions^, M^'bich were diffused among them by the Phoenician and Grecian merchants, who, before the descent of the Romans, traded to the south-west coast of Britain. That many Greek words were thus insensibly mixed with British roots is more than possible, and the ancient language of Corn- wall seems to have been a dialect of the British, intermixed with the language of Phoenicia and Greece. But to believe that the inhabitants of a remote Island, living in woods and caves, and elevated but one degree above the animals which they chased, should have attained a perfection in letters, and have founded institutions for learning equal to the most polished nations of antiquity, is only the proof of a desire to rear an historical fic- tion on the basis of antiquity, without a regard to the truth, or the probabihty of the facts which are adduced in its favour.