Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Poetic and Verse Criticism of the Reign of Elizabeth
It Is scarcely surprising that a man like Ascham should have taken this stand, when we consider that he was, before all, a scholar possessed of a far greater familiarity with the classics than with either his own or with other modern literatures. Moreover, Ascham, although unusually liberal for his age, was not without his prejudices, and one of the strongest was his prejudice against Italy, which extended, in some degree, to her authors. Ascham recognized, with perfect justice, that none of the existing English schools of poetry could compete with the formal excellence of classic models; he remembered the old tales about Virgil and Horace spying the vnperfitnes of Ennius and Plautus and that the same thing could be done, and ought to be done, in English became perfectly clear to him. We may laugh as much as we please at this simplicity in the old tutor, but if we recall Macau lay's enumeration of the books that formed the library of the Princess Elizabeth or Lady Jane Gray, ' with the conspicuous absence in it of the vast majority of our every-day English clas sics, it will readily be seen that we are demanding a pmphetic vision on the part of Ascham which is simply unreasonable.
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