Roger Ascham (1515-1568) was a Yorkshire man of the middle classes, who lived by his learning, and did not find that it paid him as well as he wished. Going early to St. John's College, Cambridge, he was a pupil of the famous Sir John Cheke, who introduced the English way of pronouncing Greek. It is certainly wrong—no people pronounce the vowels as we do; but if Cheke resisted the pronunciation of the modern Greeks, perhaps he is not much to be blamed. Ascham obtained a Fellowship and a Readership in Greek, the Fellowship he lost when he married: he did not long retain his tutorship to the Princess Elizabeth; as secretary to an ambassador in Germany he continued to teach Greek to his chief; and in his letters, Latin or English, we find him often in straits for money and begging for assistance. Camden, writing under James I, says that he lost money at dicing, and in his attack on gambling, in his "Toxophilus," a dialogue on Archery (1545), Ascham shows a rather unholy knowledge of all the tricks on the dice-board. Probably he had paid for his education. He contemplated a work on the noble sport of cock fighting, on which, of course, there was betting, and perhaps Ascham was not in all respects so severe a Puritan as in his unworthy attacks on that noblest of romances, "The Morte d'Arthur". Sir Lancelot is a better gentleman than many who were to be met at a cock fight. Ascham had little sympathy with the Italian influences that were so potent in Elizabethan literature. Italy was certainly profligate and luxurious,
An Englishman that is Italianate
Doth quickly prove a devil incarnate,
was an English translation of an Italian proverb. Ascham, like his contemporaries, was nothing if not patriotic. The bow of yew and the grey goose shaft had won many a victory over Scots and French, as in "Toxophilus," Ascham reminds these peoples; therefore he desired that archery should be universally practised. But the harquebus, a musket lighter than the heavy hand gun of the fifteenth century, was already, in disciplined hands, more than a match for the bow.
"Toxophilus," to our age, appears pedantic. We have endless classical examples, and learn that the Trojans drew the bow-string only to the breast, not the ear (which is true), while they used iron arrow-heads as against the bronze arrow-heads of the Greeks, a fact not so certain. When he does come to practice, Ascham's teaching in archery is reckoned sound and good. His ideas are summed up in the prayer that the English
Through Christ, King Henry, the Book, and the Bow
May all manner of enemies quite overthrow.
In writing English, Ascham was all for plain English. Foreign words Anglicized make such a mixture "as if you put malmsey and sack, red wine and white, ale and beer, all in one pot". Yet he advocates in his "School Master," published after his death, a yet more unhallowed blend, the use of Greek measures in English verse. "Our English tongue in avoiding barbarous rhyming may as well receive right quantity of syllables as either Greek or Latin." (He means "quantity" as opposed to accent, as if one said carpenter.) As an example he quotes Mr. Watson's rendering of the third line of the "Odyssey" into two English hexameters
All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses,
For that he knew many men's manners and saw many cities.
Obviously if we are to say "men's manners," making "man" in "manners" long, we must not make "vellers" in "travellers" short, as Mr. Watson does. We are reduced to
Gladly report great praise of Ulysses do the travellers.
This absurd manner of imitating Greek measures in English was upheld, twenty years later, by Gabriel Harvey, who, for a moment, nearly corrupted the practice of Spenser, the most naturally musical of poets. Ascham's own prose style is unaffected, not corrupted by eccentricities, but not harmonious. A new perfection, a false perfection, was to be sought later, through the antitheses, alliterations, and pedantic wit of Lyly's "Euphues!"