Nevertheless if we were to take a short list of representative Englishmen, of the men who have influenced and shaped the national life, its religion, its politics, its thoughts, who have helped to realise the English genius and to make England what it is, we should find that a large proportion of those who could have been educated at Cambridge or Oxford were in fact university men. In the following list those who have had a preponderant influence on English education from the vii century onwards, are included:--
vii-viii c. Bede.+ vii c. Hild.*+[380] viii c. Alcuin.*+ ix c. Alfred.+ xii c. Stephen Langton (Paris). " Grosseteste* Oxford (and Paris). xiii c. Roger Bacon (Paris) and Oxford. " Edward I.+ xiv c. Wyclif Oxford. " Chaucer Cambridge. " William of Wykeham*[381] none. xiv-xv c. Lady Margaret.*+ xv-xvi c. Colet* Oxford. " Bishop Fisher* Cambridge. " Wolsey Oxford. xvi c. Sir Thomas More Oxford. " Cranmer Cambridge. " Ascham* Cambridge. " Elizabeth+ " Drake none. " Raleigh[382] none. " Sir Philip Sidney Oxford. " Lord Bacon Cambridge. xvi-xvii c. Shakespeare none. " Harvey Cambridge. " Cromwell Cambridge. " Milton Cambridge. " Jeremy Taylor Cambridge. " Bunyan none. " Locke Oxford. " Newton Cambridge. xvii-xviii c. Marlborough none. xviii c. Wesley Oxford. " Clive none. xviii-xix c. Nelson+ none. " Pitt Cambridge. xix c. John Stuart Mill none. " Darwin Cambridge. " Gladstone[383] Oxford. " Florence Nightingale+[384]
Of these, 9 could not have been at a university and are marked +, but of the remaining 31, 23 were at a university; 12 at Cambridge, 10 at Oxford. Two were at both Paris and Oxford, and one was at Paris.
In this chapter, however, our concern is with the great men produced by the one university. There are two fields in which Cambridge is and always has been _facile princeps_. She has nurtured all the great scientists, and all the great poets. The discoveries of world-wide importance have been the work of Cambridge men--such were the three which revolutionised the science of the world, the laws of the circulation of the blood, of gravitation, of evolution. From Bacon the founder of experimental philosophy to Darwin and Kelvin, every great name is a Cambridge name, if we except indeed the few who like Wallace, Humphry Davy, Faraday, and the elder Herschell owe nothing to a university.