reasons for writing the _Toxophilus_ in our own and his own tongue.
There is indeed a double attraction, which has not been always or often
noticed, in this change of practice. Everybody has seen how important it
is, not merely as resisting the general delusion of contemporary
scholars that the vernaculars were things unsafe, "like to play the
bankrupt with books," but as protesting by anticipation against the
continuance of this error which affected Bacon and Hobbes, and was not
entirely without hold even on such a magician in English as Browne. But
perhaps everybody has not seen how by implication it acknowledges the
peculiar character of the genuine letter--that, though it may be a work
of art, it should not be one of artifice--that it is a matter of
"business _or_ bosoms," not of study or display.

Contemporary with these letters of Ascham, and going on to the end of
the century and the closely coincident end of the reign of Elizabeth, we
have a considerable bulk of letter-writing of more or less varied kinds.
The greatest men of letters of the time--to the disgust of one, but not
wholly so to that of another, class of "scholar"--give us little.
Spenser is the most considerable exception: and his correspondence with
Gabriel Harvey, though it is personal to a certain extent and on
Gabriel's side sufficiently character-revealing, is really of the hybrid
kind, partaking rather more of pamphlet or essay than of letter proper.
Indeed a good part of that very remarkable pamphlet-literature of this
time, which has perhaps scarcely yet received its due share of
attention, takes the letter-form: but is mostly even farther from
genuine letter-writing than the correspondence of "Immerito" and
"Master G. H." We have of course more of Harvey's; we have laments from
others, such as Lyly and Googe, about their disappointments as
courtiers; we have a good deal of State correspondence. There are some,
not very many, agreeable letters of strictly private character in whole
or part, the pleasantest of all perhaps being some of Sir Philip
Sydney's mother, Lady Mary Dudley. Others are from time to time being
made public, such as those in Dr. Williamson's recent book on the
Admiral-Earl of Cumberland. As far as mere bulk goes, Elizabethan
epistolography would take no small place, just as it would claim no mean
one in point of interest. But in an even greater degree than its
successor (_v. inf._) this _corpus_ would expose itself to the cr