SOURCE: "The Characters of Style in Elizabethan Prose," in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. LVII, No. 2, April, 1958, pp. 197-207.

In the essay below, Staton discusses the doctrines of literary style popular in England during the sixteenth century and their application in the works of such writers as Sir Philip Sidney, John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Thomas Nashe.

"Before we come to the precepts of garnishing an oracion, we thinke good, bryeffly to shewe you of the three kyndes of stile or endyghting, in the whych all the eloquucion of an oratoure is occupied. For that there be three sundry kyndes, called of the Grekes characters, of us figures, I trowe there is no man, though he be meanlye learned, but he knoweth, namely when we se so manye wryters of sciences, bothe Greke and latine, whych haue ben before tyme, to haue folowed for the...