to encourage their pupils to set embellishments and decorations, which commonly proceeded rather from a delight in language for language’s sake, than from any effect in enforcing an argument.  Their models for these exercises can be traced in their influence on later writers.  One of the most popular of them, Erasmus’s “Discourse Persuading a Young Man to Marriage,” which was translated in an English text-book of rhetoric, reminds one of the first part of Shakespeare’s sonnets.  The literary affectation called euphuism was directly based on the precepts of the handbooks on rhetoric; its author, John Lyly, only elaborated and made more precise tricks of phrase and writing, which had been used as exercises in the schools of his youth.  The prose of his school, with its fantastic delight in exuberance of figure and sound, owed its inspiration, in its form ultimately to Cicero, and in the decorations with which it was embellished, to the elder Pliny and later writers of his kind.  The long declamatory speeches and the sententiousness of the early drama were directly modelled on Seneca, through whom was faintly reflected the tragedy of Greece, unknown directly or almost unknown to English readers.  Latinism, like every new craze, became a passion, and ran through the less intelligent kinds of writing in a wild excess.  Not much of the literature of this time remains in common knowledge, and for examples of these affectations one must turn over the black letter pages of forgotten books.  There high-sounding and familiar words are handled and bandied about with delight, and you can see in volume after volume these minor and forgotten authors gloating over the new found treasure which placed them in their time in the van of literary success.  That they are obsolete now, and indeed were obsolete before they were dead, is a warning to authors who intend similar extravagances.  Strangeness and exoticism are not lasting wares.  By the time of “Love’s Labour Lost” they had become nothing more than matter for laughter, and it is only through their reflection and distortion in Shakespeare’s pages that we know them now.

Had not a restraining influence, anxiously and even acrimoniously urged, broken in on their endeavours the English language to-day might have been almost as completely latinized as Spanish or Italian.  That the essential Saxon purity of our tongue has been preserved is to the credit not of sensible unlettered people eschewing new fashions they could not comprehend, but to the scholars themselves.  The chief service that Cheke and Ascham and their fellows rendered to English literature was their crusade against the exaggerated latinity that they had themselves helped to make possible, the crusade against what they called “inkhorn terms.”  “I am of this opinion,” said Cheke in a prefatory letter to a book translated by a friend of his, “that our own tongue should be written clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with the borrowing of other tongues, wherein if we take