Together with Sir Thomas More, Sir Thomas Elyot was the most outstanding English humanist of his generation. He was the first writer in English to fashion the idea of a gentleman educated according to a humanist curriculum; he wrote the earliest important manual of health in English; he compiled the first English dictionary of classical Latin; he was the first to translate directly from Greek into English; and he was a pioneer in the use of the vernacular for serious writing, consciously seeking to enrich and augment the English language. Generally, he was the most important English exemplar in the early sixteenth century of Erasmian humanism--in the range of his interests, in his attempts to combine contemplation with action, and in his lifelong devotion to the publication of scholarly works aimed at improving society through the dissemination of idealistic humanist precepts founded in the wisdom of the ancients...