In the dedication to his first important work on rhetoric, A treatise of Schemes & Tropes very profytable for the better vnderstanding of good authors, gathered out of the best Grammarians & Oratours by Rychard Sherry Londoner (1550), Richard Sherry compares the rewards of the study of the forms of language to the "corporall . . . pleasures" afforded by "a goodlye garden." All of his surviving works--a translation of a religious text and two rhetorical treatises on elocution--evince a strong fascination with and love of language. Language was for him a domain of pleasure and lifelong passion. The fascination, reverence, and care with which he treated language both as a translator and as a theorizing rhetorician won him respect and fame among his contemporaries, and he remains known as one of the foremost rhetoricians of the English Renaissance and the first among the "figurists"--rhetoricians who took elocution, or style, as their focus...