244 History of Universities
uel (the college of John Harvard) and Sidney Sussex (the
college of Oliver Cromwell), catered to this class, without
excluding the other. Many sons of the squirearchy and the
mercantile families were recruited for the Church, and par-
sons’ sons for business : in one of the colleges it was solemnly
debated whether a “pious dunce” made a better minister than
a “learned rake-hell,” and the latter won the decision. Prob-
ably the close integration of the Church of England with
English life has been due to this commingling between young
men of all classes at the universities, where the ministry of
that Church was trained.
At the time the English colonies were founded, this es-
sentially English compromise between gentility and learning
had existed for a century. Regarded as the natural and
proper thing, it was introduced into the colonial colleges, and
has become part of the pattern and tradition of American
college life. In fact, this social contact between the poor
scholar and the squire’s son has, had a very important part
in making the English and American college what it is today :
the despair of educational reformers and logical pedagogues,
the astonishment of European scholars, a place which is
neither a house of learning nor a house of play, but a little of
both ; and withal a microcosm of the world in which we live.
To this sixteenth-century compromise, become a tradition,
we owe that common figure of the English-speaking world,
“a gentleman and a scholar.”
Such were several among the leading founders of Virginia
and New England: men like George Sandys, who translated
Ovid in the Virginian wilderness; the Winthrops and Salton-
stalls of Massachusetts, and Peter Bulkeley, of whom Cotton
Mather wrote that his education was “Learned, Genteel, and
Pious.” To America they brought a zeal for scriptural re-
ligion and a love of the humanist tradition. From their