er of English
itself. A slight sense of its not being so "easy" to write in English as in
Latin, and of the consequent advisableness of keeping to a sober beaten
path, to a kind of style which is not much more English (except for being
composed of good English words in straightforward order) than it is any
literary language framed to a great extent on the classics, shows itself in
him. One might translate passage after passage of Ascham, keeping almost
the whole order of the words, into very good sound Latin prose; and,
indeed, his great secret in the _Schoolmaster_ (the perpetual translation
and retranslation of English into the learned languages, and especially
Latin) is exactly what would form such a style. It is, as the following
examples from both works will show, clear, not inelegant, invaluable as a
kind of go-cart to habituate the infant limbs of prose English to orderly
movement; but it is not original, or striking, or characteristic, or
calculated to show the native powers and capacities of the language.

"I can teach you to shoot fair, even as Socrates taught a man
once to know God. For when he asked him what was God? 'Nay,'
saith he, 'I can tell you better what God is not, as God is not
ill, God is unspeakable, unsearchable, and so forth. Even
likewise can I say of fair shooting, it hath not this
discommodity with it nor that discommodity, and at last a man may
so shift all the discommodities from shooting that there shall be
left nothing behind but fair shooting. And to do this the better
you must remember how that I told you when I described generally
the whole nature of shooting, that fair shooting came of these
things of standing, nocking, drawing, holding and loosing; the
which I will go over as shortly as I can, describing the
discommodities that men commonly use in all parts of their
bodies, that you, if you fault in any such, may know it, and go
about to amend it. Faults in archers do exceed the number of
archers, which come with use of shooting without teaching. Use
and custom separated from knowledge and learning, doth not only
hurt shooting, but the most weighty things in the world beside.
And, therefore, I marvel much at those people which be the
maintainers of uses without knowledge, having no other word in
their mouth but this use, use, custom, custom. Such men, more
wilful than wise, b