240 History of Universities
ually became the rule in continental universities. It is a curi-
ous fact, never satisfactorily explained, that the continental
university colleges gradually faded out, until there were no
foundations left for lodging and boarding students; it is
only since the world war that Paris has acquired her cité
universitaire.
The founders of the first English colonial college, Har-
vard, were familiar with the Dutch universities, which had
given a hospitable reception to exiled English Puritans. The
Pilgrim Fathers spent twelve years in Leyden before emigrat-
ing to America ; several of the New England clergy had actu-
ally studied at Leyden or Franeker. But when they came
to found an institution of higher education they followed the
colleges of their home land, rather than the more modern
type of university in The Netherlands.
It was fortunate for England, and for us, that the Prot-
estant Reformation, and the Classical Renaissance, struck
the English universities at the same time; fortunate, too,
that the Reformation in England was a unifying, not a dis-
ruptive movement, accepted by the nation without a civil
war, and, that the Tudor monarchs were humanists and
patrons of learning. Not that Oxford and Cambridge liked
the Reformation any better than did other universities, or
that they managed to evade the heavy hand of the State.
Cambridge first showed a disposition to resist the Reforma-
tion, and then swung to the other extreme and tried to carry
out the Reformation to its logical conclusion with Puritan-
ism. In consequence, that university had a set of irrepealable
and unamendable statutes imposed on her by Queen Eliza-
beth ; and Oxford was similarly treated by Charles I.
The colleges of Cambridge and Oxford, as we have seen,
had already absorbed the teaching function of the Univer-
sity, so that the Renaissance found both Universities un-