PROSE.
Elizabethan prose has neither the sig nificance nor the splendor of Elizabethan poetry. The greatest masters, Sidney, Lyly, Hooker, have no supreme interest of matter or style; and Bacon belongs in spirit to another age with other ideals and another ethos. But the shaping of English speech as an instrument for the science and thought of the 17th century was the result of the efforts of Elizabethan prosemen. Before the period itself commences, the work of More, Elyot and Latimer, of Coverdale, Tyn dale and the editors of the English Prayerbook, had already brought a simple and vigorous vernacular into being; but the ancestors of Augustan prose were the group of Cambridge scholars, Cheke, Wilson and Ascham, whose writings, with the exception of the 'Schole master,' antedate the accession of Elizabeth. This group devoted considerable attention to the study of English rhetoric; they aimed at plainness and purity of speech and the forma tion of a literary vernacular in emulation of the classics; they objected to archaisms and affectations of all sorts, and Wilson's condemna tion of "ink-horn terms') is one of the signifi cant loci of English criticism. The introduc tion of classical studies as a result of the revival of learning had necessitated a complete revision of the mediaeval curriculum, and Ascham's 'Scholemaster,) published posthumously in 1570, follows the fashion set by the humanists of Italy, France and Germany, in a very large number of pedagogical treatises. Like these humanists, it was his purpose to indicate the education necessary to a cultivated gentleman. His own prose style is simple and direct, bor rowing the more inconspicuous excellences of Latin prose. But his mood is in some respects that of the Puritan; and in his suspicion of romance and of the growing Italian influence, he is at odds with the whole spirit of Eliza bethan life and letters. Prose and poetry alike were to be saturated with the Italianate spirit which he contemns.
Ascham is in some measure the father of that whole school of Elizabethan stylists, whose model was "eloquence' in the classical and humanistic sense, and who disregarded the ornate and tendencies of Continental prose. The full and rich notes of Hooker are
the final culmination of this manner. The first four books of the 'Ecclesiastical Polity' were published in 1594: several schools of Novella Elocutio had intervened since the composition of the (Scholemaster,) but they have not affected the purity and directness, the calm and judicious argumentation of Hooker's style and manner. In this great book, moderation and passion temper each other after the fashion of the best Latin prose; and Hooker realizes the ambitions of the earlier English humanists who had made this their ultimate goal. Other models and other ambitions could alone make it pos sible to arrive at a higher standard than that which Hooker achieves at his best. Much of the book is unreadable to-day, like the technical arguments of the Attic orators; but its soaring passages, like theirs, are monuments of the race and religion whose ardor and conviction they express.
Directness and vigor were also put to far different uses both in secular and in religious polemics. Of the latter, the Martin Marprel ate Controversy relating to the problem of church discipline, which raged between 1587 and 1590, gave opportunities which secular pamphleteers only too soon made use of. The significance of 'Hay any work for Cooper?' and 'Pap with a Hatchet' has been greatly over rated; in them the instrument which the Cam bridge group had prepared for use was blunted and used as a cudgel. Nor can much more be said of the controversial writing of Nash, Greene and Harvey, in which is illustrated the nearest Elizabethan approximation to modern journalism, but with manners and morals untempered by a wholesome or cultivated pub lic opinion. Other miscellaneous writings of these men, and of Dekker, Breton and others, are concerned with every variety of subject, and their models include Aretino, Rabelais, Dede kind, as well as other Continental writers of a wholly different type.