Angel Day was a rhetorician, poet, and translator whose importance chiefly derives from his epistolary manual The English Secretary (1586). This guide to correspondence, or "letter-writer," appears to be the first handbook of its kind to be composed of original English letters rather than translations of Latin models. Responsive to a sixteenth-century vogue for how-to guides, courtesy manuals, and ready handbooks of acculturation aimed at the "middle" and rising classes, The English Secretary was one of the most popular Elizabethan letter-writers, republished more than ten times by 1639. It was also one of the most ambitious. In subsequent editions Day augmented his handbook not only with an expanding variety of model letters for the user's instruction and imitation, but also with a relatively detailed treatise on rhetorical forms and figures, a systematic discussion whose usefulness extends well beyond framing simple utilitarian correspondence. Day also appends another treatise to his handbook...