interests of a homely and often grotesque popular style. From all of these experiments much good resulted in the formation of the literary speech which the sixteenth century passed on to the seventeenth. But what was needed above all in the welter of experimentation was some sense of moderation, some feeling for a strong central idiom which should enable the writer of English to avoid both the extreme of artistic fantasy and of an ignoble Saxon bluntness. This need of a safe standard was supplied by the English Bible and the English Prayer Book. They were popular in the sense that they were intelligible to the great public and were cast in the forms of normal English speech. But they were literary, also, in that they were elevated above the ephemeral colloquial language, and in that they satisfied not only the intelligence of their readers, but also their feeling for propriety, and for dignity and beauty of expression. The direct influence of the Bible and the Prayer Book upon certain writers of the sixteenth and of later centuries has been very great. The ultimate significance of the books is to be found, however, in something deeper than the occasional and specific influence which they have exerted upon the style of individual writers. It is to be found in the fact that they were, for all Englishmen, unquestioned achievements of the English language. They became a great steadying, unifying tradition, and by their popular acceptance, one of the implicit conditions of all later use of English speech.

VI

THE COURTLY WRITERS

THE NEW LEARNING INFLUENCE OF THE CLASSICS— AUREATE DICTION-CAXTON-SKELTON-THE TUMBLING' STYLE-WORD-BORROWING-CHEKE-ASCHAM -SIR THOMAS WILSON-THE RHETORICIANS-THE INGENIOUS STYLE-GUEVARA AND HIS INFLUENCELORD BERNERS-SIR THOMAS NORTH-THE INGENIOUS STYLE IN FICTION-THE SCHOOL OF LYLY-SIDNEY AND ARCADIANISM

I

THE ideal of the scholar and gentleman as mutually complementary sides of the perfect character greatly occupied the minds of Englishmen in the early sixteenth century. The new order of thought, as well as the old to which it stood in contrast, is illustrated in an anecdote of the time of Henry VIII. A certain great peer of the court expressed the opinion that "it was enough for noblemen's sons to wind their horn, and carry their hawk well, that study was for the children of a meaner rank." To this Pace, scholar and statesman, answered that "then noblemen must be content that their children may wind their horns and carry their hawks while meaner men's sons do wield the affairs of state." 1

Similar warnings and counsels are expressed by another of Henry's servants. In one of his numerous treatises written for the profit of his "natural country," Sir Thomas

'Hall, "Quo Vadis," Works, ed. Wynter, IX, 538.

Elyot expounds his belief that the old chivalric rule of conduct must give place to a new one, not based on valor and courtesy, but on knowledge. That which soonest "helpeth a man to virtue," the one "sure and honest rule of livynge," Elyot declares, is learning. "All other thynges temporall be but tryfils and not of such value that there in we ought to spende any studye." He then compares learning with "gentylnes of bloud," with fortune, with honor, with other virtues, but he returns to the opinion that learning is the most important of all.2 That Elyot earnestly believed in these views, and all the more earnestly since they came to him with the sanction of Plutarch's approval, his own life bears ample witness. His "boke called the Governour," his "Castel of health," his "Dictionary," all his many publications were sent forth with the single intent of providing Englishmen of his day with the learning and with the principles of conduct befitting the cultivated scholar and gentleman.

But Elyot was not altogether the first by scholarly precept or example to set this new ideal of literary culture before Englishmen's eyes. Before his time Lydgate, Caxton, Berners, and Skelton had in some measure adumbrated the coming of a new scholarship and a new sense for literary form in England. Elyot was merely part of a general movement, he was one of many who added dignity to the practice of letters both by their scholarly standards in writing and by the distinguished social positions which they themselves held. In greater or less degree they realized the ideal set forth in Castiglione's description of the courtier as one who not only knew how " to ride and manage

The Education or bringinge up of children, translated oute of Plutarche by syr Thomas Eliot, knight. Cap. V. The book is undated, but it was certainly written before 1540, since it is mentioned in The Image of Goverance, published in that year.

well his horse," but who was also "well spoken and fair languaged," who could write in prose or in verse, and who practiced the arts of the pen, like those of the sword, with grace and freedom.

The forces which brought about this changed attitude towards literature and learning, hitherto almost exclusively the pursuit of ecclesiastics, were of mixed native and foreign origin. In part they were closely bound up with the impulses which from the beginning of the fifteenth century had been changing the character of the popular English mind. When Occleve advised Sir John Oldcastle to rest content with the story of Launcelot de Lake or of the siege of Troy or Thebes, he proved that he had understood neither the popular nor the learned tendencies of his time. The popular reformers could no longer be quieted with lifeless summaries of dogmatic doctrine. Nor could the lovers of imaginative writing and of good style content themselves with the faded plots and worn out literary devices of medieval romance. In Malory's Morte Darthur we have the last vanishing echoes from the din and uproar of primitive fighting, loving, feasting mankind, echoes that become, as is the nature of such sounds, purer and sweeter in quality as they become fainter and remoter from the actuality of their origin. New and fresh material was needed upon which the artistic imagination could vigorously exert itself. The cultivated writers of Renascence England wisely did not often try to breathe new life into the old stories of Arthur and Alexander, of Troy and of Thebes. Stronger attraction was exerted from a different direction.

In the earlier years of the English Renascence two constant elements in the development of the new literary art were admiration for the language and literature of classical antiquity and desire to transfer the qualities which disSee above, p. 58.

tinguish the writings of the ancients to English, or at least to create their equivalents in the English vernacular. The position which French, the language of romance, had occupied in the fourteenth century, was now taken by Greek, and more especially by Latin. The constant effort of the early English humanists was to raise their English composition to the level of classical style. Even as early as Lydgate the tendency towards lofty style is elaborately exemplified, and the high esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries, and even by his successors of several generations later, as for example Caxton, Hawes, and Skelton, was due to the fact that he was regarded as herald of a new generation. In comparison Chaucer began to seem quaint and old and rude.

But though the writings of antiquity provided the general standards of excellence for English stylists, one does not find, either early or late, that they were very closely imitated as models. There were many admirers of Cicero among English courtly writers, but there was no English Cicero. In this respect English humanism differed from Italian, for in the writings of Bembo and the extremer 'Italian stylists, native spontaneity was completely stifled by iron-clad rules of servile imitation. Early English humanists were both less scholarly and in less degree animated by a passionate love of the fine art of writing than were the humanists of Italy during the corresponding period of the development of Italian literature. In Skelton, in Caxton, in Sir Thomas Elyot, one observes only a general and remote resemblance to Ciceronian eloquence. Even in writers like Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More, who were more immediately and consciously under the spell of Latin style, the form and rhetorical dress of classic expression are only in slight measure carried over into English. Ascham speaks of "that excellent perfitnesse" in speech