There was sense in the humanist contention.  It is very easy to say the right thing in the wrong way; in other spheres than diplomacy the choice of language is important.  Words have a history of their own, and often acquire associations independent of their meaning.  Rhythm, too, and clearness need attention.  An unbalanced sentence goes haltingly and jars; an ambiguous pronoun causes the reader to stumble.  An ill-written book, an ill-worded speech fail of their effects; it is not merely by sympathy and character that men persuade.  But of course the humanists pushed the matter too far.  Pendulums do not reach the repose of the mean without many tos and fros.  Elegance is good, but the art of reasoning is not to be neglected.  Of the length to which they went Ascham’s method of instruction in the Scholemaster (1570) is a good example.  He wished his scholar to translate Cicero into English, and then from the English to translate back into the actual words of the Latin.  The Ciceronians did not believe that the same thing could be well said in many ways; rather there was one way which transcended all others, and that Cicero had attained.  Erasmus, however, was no Ciceronian; and one of the reasons why he won such a hold upon his own and subsequent generations was that, more than all his contemporaries, he succeeded in establishing a reasonable accord between the claims of form and matter in literature.

In their neglect of the classics the Schoolmen had a powerful ally.  For obvious reasons the early and the mediaeval Church felt that much of classical literature was injurious to the minds of the young, and in consequence discouraged the use of it in schools.  The classics were allowed to perish, and their place was taken by Christian poets such as Prudentius or Juvencus, by moralizations of Aesop, patchwork compositions known as ‘centos’ on Scriptural themes, and the like.  The scholars, therefore, who went to Italy and came home to the North carrying the new enthusiasm, had strenuous opposition to encounter.  The Schoolmen considered them impertinent, the Church counted them immoral.  To us who know which way the conflict ended, the savage blows delivered by the humanists seem mere brutality; they lash their fallen foes with what appears inhuman ferocity.  But the truth is that the struggle was not finished until well into the sixteenth century.  Biel of Tubingen, ‘the last of the Schoolmen’, lived till 1495.  Between 1501 and 1515 a single printer, Wolff of Basle, produced five massive volumes of the Summae of mediaeval Doctors.  Through the greater part, therefore, of Erasmus’ life the upholders of the old systems and ideals, firmly entrenched by virtue of possession, succeeded in maintaining their supremacy in the schools.