than the composition of English
literature merely as English literature. He wanted to bring a certain
subject under the notice of readers of the vulgar tongue, and being before
all things a scholar he could not help making a scholarly use of that
tongue. The wonder is that, in his circumstances and with his purposes,
with hardly any teachers, with not a great stock of verbal material, and
with little or no tradition of workmanship in the art, he should have
turned out such admirable work.

It would be interesting to dwell on the prose of Fulke Greville, Sidney's
friend, who long outlived him, and who anticipated not a little of that
magnificence of the prose of his later contemporaries, beside which I have
ventured to suggest that Sidney's own is sometimes but _rococo_. A place
ought to be given to Richard Knolles, who deserves, if not the name of the
first historian of England, certainly the credit of making, in his _History
of the Turks_ (1604), a step from the loose miscellany of the chronicle to
the ordered structure of the true historic style. Some would plead for
Richard Mulcaster, whose work on education and especially on the teaching
of the English tongue in his _Positions_ and _First Part of the Elementary_
(1582) is most intimately connected with our general subject. But there is
no room for more than a mention of these, or for further dwelling on the
translators already glanced at and others, the most important and
influential of whom was John Florio, the Englisher (1603) of Montaigne.

CHAPTER III

THE FIRST DRAMATIC PERIOD

It does not belong to the plan of this division of the present book to
trace the earliest beginnings of the English theatre, or those intermediate
performances by which, in the reigns of the four first Tudors, the Mystery
and Morality passed into the Interlude. Even the two famous comedies of
_Ralph Roister Doister_ and _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ stand as it were only
at the threshold of our period in this chapter, and everything before them
is shut out of it. On the other hand, we can take to be our province the
whole rise, flourishing, and decadence of the extraordinary product, known
somewhat loosely as the Elizabethan drama. We shall in the present chapter
discuss the two comedies or rather farces just mentioned, and notice on the
one hand the rather amorphous production which, during the first thirty
years of Elizabeth, represented the influence of a growing taste for
perso