ced, to feel contempt
towards their mother tongue. There are persons, wrote George Pettie in
1581, "who will set light by my labours, because I write in English: and
those are some nice travailours who retourne home with such queasie
stomachs that nothing will downe with them but French, Italian or
Spanish ... They count [our tongue] barren: they count it barbarous:
they count it unworthy to be accounted of." The more reason, thinks
Pettie, to try to polish it; if it is barren it can be enriched by
borrowing from other languages, especially the Latin: "It is indeed the
readie waie to inrich our tongue and make it copious; and it is the
waie which all tongues have taken to inrich themselves."[32] Pettie, as
we see, wished Du Bellay's advice to be followed, and Rome to be
"plundered."

But Ascham's pleading, though many others spoke to the same effect,[33]
had very little result. Learned and well informed as he was, his
"conservatism" in all things was so intense that much might be laid to
the account of this tendency of his mind. Had he not written that "his
soul had such an horror of English or Latin books containing new
doctrines that, except the psalter and the New Testament, this last,
too, in the Greek text, he had never taken any book, 'either small or
big,' to use Plato's words, concerning Christian religion"?[34] Had he
not recommended the bow as, even in those gunpowder times, the best
weapon in war? "If I were of authority, I would counsel all the
gentlemen and yeomen of England not to change it with any other thing,
how good soever it seems to be; but that still, according to the old
wont of England, youths should use it for the most honest pastime in
peace, that men might handle it as a most sure weapon in war."[35] The
other "strong weapons" must not lead men to forget this one: a thing
they have nevertheless done.

Nothing dismayed by the threat of the dire consequences of Circe's
wiles, travellers eager to see her crowded to the south. They continued
not to "exchewe the way to Circes court, but go & ryde & runne & flie
thether."[36] No education was complete without a sojourn on the
continent. Surrey, Wyatt, Sidney, penniless Robert Greene, and hundreds
if not thousands of others went there. There was an eagerness to see and
to learn that no sight and no knowledge could satisfy, that no threat
nor sermon could stop. Paris, Venice, Rome, Vienna, the Low Countries,
received an ever-increasing flood of Engl