SOURCE: Belloc, Hilaire. “Cambridge.” In Cranmer: Archbishop of Canterbury, 1533-1556, pp. 32-47. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1931.

In the following excerpt, Belloc praises Cranmer's prose, arguing that his genius was not innate but rather the product of deliberate and scholarly effort.

[The] genius of Cranmer in this supreme art of his—the fashioning of rhythmic English prose—was not of that spontaneous kind which produces great sentences or pages in flashes, as it were, unplanned, surging up of themselves in the midst of lesser matter; he was not among prose writers what such men as Shakespeare or Ronsard are among the poets—voluminous, uneven, and without conscious effort compelled to produce splendours in a process of which they are themselves not aware. He was, on the contrary, a jeweller in prose, a man who sat down deliberately to write in a particular way when there was need or...