mpathising with their ideals. They were a band of serious and
dignified scholars, men preoccupied with morality and good-citizenship,
and holding those as worth more than the lighter interests of learning
and style. It is perhaps characteristic of the English temper that the
revival of the classical tongues, which in Italy made for paganism, and
the pursuit of pleasure in life and art, in England brought with it in
the first place a new seriousness and gravity of life, and in religion
the Reformation. But in a way the scholars fought against tendencies in
their age, which were both too fast and too strong for them. At a time
when young men were writing poetry modelled on the delicate and
extravagant verse of Italy, were reading Italian novels, and affecting
Italian fashions in speech and dress, they were fighting for sound
education, for good classical scholarship, for the purity of native
English, and behind all these for the native strength and worth of the
English character, which they felt to be endangered by orgies of
reckless assimilation from abroad. The revival of the classics at Oxford
and Cambridge could not produce an Erasmus or a Scaliger; we have no
fine critical scholarship of this age to put beside that of Holland or
France. Sir John Cheke and his followers felt they had a public and
national duty to perform, and their knowledge of the classics only
served them for examples of high living and morality, on which
education, in its sense of the formation of character, could be based.

The literary influence of the revival of letters in England, apart from
its moral influence, took two contradictory and opposing forms. In the
curricula of schools, logic, which in the Middle Ages had been the
groundwork of thought and letters, gave place to rhetoric. The reading
of the ancients awakened new delight in the melody and beauty of
language: men became intoxicated with words. The practice of rhetoric
was universal and it quickly coloured all literature. It was the habit
of the rhetoricians to choose some subject for declamation and round it
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 transl