10 THE ARTE OR CRAFTE OF RHETHORYKE
It therefore seems improbable that the first edition of \\\ Rhetoric,
published without date, but assigned definitely to 1524 by many
bibliographers, could have appeared in that year,
Date of Cox's itt ' it - from his school in Reading. 1 Prob-
Rhetonc.
ably, however, somewhere between 1527 and 1530
Cox returned to England and was appointed master of the school at Reading 2 by Hugh Faringdon, the Abbot of the place. He was certainly in this position before 3 February 1530, when he supplicated for incorporation and for M. A. at Oxford, " as being schoolmaster at Redyng." 4
Again, it is impossible to assume with Hallam 5 that Cox's Rhetoric was written in 1524 and that his Mcthodus Humaniorum Studiorum in 1526 is a translation of the Rhetoric into Latin, for the simple reason that the Rhetoric is itself in greater part a trans- lation from a well-known Latin original into English, as I shall later have occasion to show, and there could be no reason for making another version in Latin by translating back from the English.
In May 1527, Erasmus, whose name we find mentioned several
times in the course of the following Rhetoric, wrote to Cox, who
was probably still at Casehau, a letter which has been
6 er r01 preserved among the Epistles of Erasmus (Erasmi
Epistola, Lugduni Batavorum 1706,982 C., Epistola
DCCCLXVI). The following synopsis of the letter is given in
Brewer : 6
1 See Cox's dedication to his Rhetoric, infra p. 39.
2 John Man, History and Antiquities of Reading (Reading, 1816), p. 196, says John Long was master of this school from 1503 to 1530, and was "succeeded in 1530 by Leonard Cox A. M."
3 Not "soon afterwards," as is stated in the D. N. B. and other biographies.
<In Boase, Register of the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1885), Vol. I, p. 159, the entry stands : " Cox, Leonard, B.A. of Cambridge sup. 19 Feb. 15 \\ for incor- poration and for M.A. and for disp. as being schoolmaster at Redyng." See also Cox's verses in Palsgrave's L Esclarcissement, in 1530, infra, p. 20.
s Hallam, Literature of Europe, Pt. I, ch. viii, at end. Followed by Jebb, article " Rhetoric " in Encyd. Brit., 9th ed.
6 Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII, Vol. IV.
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