not heed by time, ever borrowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt.”  Writings in the Saxon vernacular like the sermons of Latimer, who was careful to use nothing not familiar to the common people, did much to help the scholars to save our prose from the extravagances which they dreaded.  Their attack was directed no less against the revival of really obsolete words.  It is a paradox worth noting for its strangeness that the first revival of mediaevalism in modern English literature was in the Renaissance itself.  Talking in studious archaism seems to have been a fashionable practice in society and court circles.  “The fine courtier,” says Thomas Wilson in his Art of Rhetoric, “will talk nothing but Chaucer.”  The scholars of the English Renaissance fought not only against the ignorant adoption of their importations, but against the renewal of forgotten habits of speech.

Their efforts failed, and their ideals had to wait for their acceptance till the age of Dryden, when Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton, all of them authors who consistently violated the standards of Cheke, had done their work.  The fine courtier who would talk nothing but Chaucer was in Elizabeth’s reign the saving of English verse.  The beauty and richness of Spenser is based directly on words he got from Troilus and Cressida and the Canterbury Tales.  Some of the most sonorous and beautiful lines in Shakespeare break every canon laid down by the humanists.

“Th’ extravagant and erring spirit hies
 To his confine”

is a line, three of the chief words of which are Latin importations that come unfamiliarly, bearing their original interpretation with them.  Milton is packed with similar things:  he will talk of a crowded meeting as “frequent” and use constructions which are unintelligible to anyone who does not possess a knowledge—­and a good knowledge—­of Latin syntax.  Yet the effect is a good poetic effect.  In attacking latinisms in the language borrowed from older poets Cheke and his companions were attacking the two chief sources of Elizabethan poetic vocabulary.  All the sonorousness, beauty and dignity of the poetry and the drama which followed them would have been lost had they succeeded in their object, and their verse would have been constrained into the warped and ugly forms of Sternhold and Hopkins, and those with them who composed the first and worst metrical version of the Psalms.  When their idea reappeared for its fulfilment phantasy and imagery had temporarily worn themselves out, and the richer language made simplicity possible and adequate for poetry.