Literature as it developed in the reign of Elizabeth ran counter to the hopes and desires of the men who began the movement; the common usage which extends the term Elizabethan backwards outside the limits of the reign itself, has nothing but its carelessness to recommend it.  The men of the early renaissance in the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, belonged to a graver school than their successors.  They were no splendid courtiers, nor daring and hardy adventurers, still less swashbucklers, exquisites, or literary dandies.  Their names—­Sir John Cheke, Roger Ascham, Nicholas Udall, Thomas Wilson, Walter Haddon, belong rather to the universities and to the coteries of learning, than to the court.  To the nobility, from whose essays and belles lettres Elizabethan poetry was to develop, they stood in the relation of tutors rather than of companions, suspecting the extravagances of their pupils rather than sympathising with their ideals.  They were a band of serious and dignified scholars, men preoccupied with morality and good-citizenship, and holding those as worth more than the lighter interests of learning and style.  It is perhaps characteristic of the English temper that the revival of the classical tongues, which in Italy made for paganism, and the pursuit of pleasure in life and art, in England brought with it in the first place a new seriousness and gravity of life, and in religion the Reformation.  But in a way the scholars fought against tendencies in their age, which were both too fast and too strong for them.  At a time when young men were writing poetry modelled on the delicate and extravagant verse of Italy, were reading Italian novels, and affecting Italian fashions in speech and dress, they were fighting for sound education, for good classical scholarship, for the purity of native English, and behind all these for the native strength and worth of the English character, which they felt to be endangered by orgies of reckless assimilation from abroad.  The revival of the classics at Oxford and Cambridge could not produce an Erasmus or a Scaliger; we have no fine critical scholarship of this age to put beside that of Holland or France.  Sir John Cheke and his followers felt they had a public and national duty to perform, and their knowledge of the classics only served them for examples of high living and morality, on which education, in its sense of the formation of character, could be based.

The literary influence of the revival of letters in England, apart from its moral influence, took two contradictory and opposing forms.  In the curricula of schools, logic, which in the Middle Ages had been the groundwork of thought and letters, gave place to rhetoric.  The reading of the ancients awakened new delight in the melody and beauty of language:  men became intoxicated with words.  The practice of rhetoric was universal and it quickly coloured all literature.  It was the habit of the rhetoricians to choose some subject for declamation and round it