e chaplain at Oxnead, or Sir John
Fortescue had occupied there something like the position of Mr.
Tulkinghorn in _Bleak House_, we should not have got much "literature"
from any known prose-writer of the period. Nor was it wanted. As for
interestingness of matter, the people who expect newspaper-correspondent
fine writing about the Wars of the Roses may be disappointed; but some
of us who have had experience of that dialect from the Russells of the
Crimea through the Forbeses of 1870 to the chroniclers of Armageddon the
other day will probably not be very unhappy. The Paston Letters are
simply genuine family correspondence--of a genuineness all the more
certain because of their commonplaceness. It is impossible to conceive
anything further from the initial type of the Greek rhetorical "letter"
of which we have just been saying something. They are not, to any but an
excessively "high-browed" and high-flying person, uninteresting: but the
chief point about them is their solidity and their satisfaction, in
their own straightforward unvarnished way, of the test we started with.
When Margaret Paston and the rest write, it is because they have
something to say to somebody who cannot be actually spoken to. And that
something is said.

[Sidenote: ASCHAM]

The next body of letters--Ascham's--which seems to call for notice here
is of the next century. It has not a few points of appeal, more than one
of which concern us very nearly. Most of the writers of the Paston
Letters were, though in some cases of good rank and fairly educated,
persons entirely unacademic in character, and their society was that of
the last trouble and convulsion through which the Early Middle Ages
struggled into the Renaissance, so long delayed with us. Ascham was one
of our chief representatives of the Renaissance itself--that is to say,
of a type at once scholarly and man-of-the-worldly, a courtier and a
diplomatist as well as a "don" and a man of letters; a sportsman as well
as a schoolmaster. And while from all these points of view his letters
have interest, there is one thing about them which is perhaps more
interesting to us than any other: and that is the fact that while he
begins to write in Latin--the all but mother-tongue of all scholars of
the time, and the universal language of the educated, even when not
definitely scholarly, throughout Europe--he exchanges this for English
latterly, in the same spirit which prompted his famous expression of