hrases of the languages enforced me." Yet he believes that his
version is not unnecessarily hard to understand, and he urges readers
who have found it difficult to "read it ofter, in which doing you shall
find (as many have confessed to me that they have found by experience)
that those things which at first reading shall displease you for
hardness shall be found so easy as so hard matter would suffer, and for
the most part more easy than some other phrase which should with greater
looseness and smoother sliding away deceive your understanding."

Thomas Wilson, who dedicated his translation of Demosthenes to Sir
William Cecil in 1570, links himself with the earlier group of
translators by his detailed references to Cheke. Like Norton he is very
conscious of the difficulty of translation. "I never found in my life,"
he writes of this piece of work, "anything so hard for me to do." "Such
a hard thing it is," he adds later, "to bring matter out of any one
language into another." A vigorous advocate of translation, however, he
does not despise his own tongue. "The cunning is no less," he declares,
"and the praise as great in my judgment, to translate anything
excellently into English, as into any other language," and he hopes
that, if his own attempt proves unsuccessful, others will make the
trial, "that such an orator as this is might be so framed to speak our
tongue as none were able to amend him, and that he might be found to be
most like himself." Wilson comes to his task with all the equipment that
the period could afford; his preface gives evidence of a critical
acquaintance with numerous Latin renderings of his author. From Cheke,
however, he has gained something more valuable, the power to feel the
vital, permanent quality in the work of Demosthenes. Cheke, he says,
"was moved greatly to like Demosthenes above all others, for that he
saw him so familiarly applying himself to the sense and understanding of
the common people, that he sticked not to say that none ever was more
fit to make an Englishman tell his tale praiseworthily in any open
hearing either in parliament or in pulpit or otherwise, than this only
orator was." Wilson shares this opinion and, representative of the
changing standards of Elizabethan scholarship, prefers Demosthenes to
Cicero. "Demosthenes used a plain, familiar manner of writing and
speaking in all his actions," he says in his _Preface to the Reader_,
"applying himself to the people's nature