Only one name of literary significance do we pluck from the annals of her time; it is that of Roger Ascham,[84] the writer of her Latin letters, and for a considerable time her secretary. How, being a Protestant as he was, and an undissembling one, he kept his head upon his shoulders so near her throne, it is hard to conjecture. He must have studied the art of keeping silence as well as the arts of speech.
He was born in that rich, lovely region of Yorkshire—watered by the River Swale—where we found the young Wyclif: his father was a house-steward; but he early made show of such qualities as invited the assistance of rich friends, through whose offices he was entered at St. John’s College, Cambridge, at fifteen, and took his degree at eighteen. He was full of American pluck, aptness, and industry; was known specially for his large gifts in language; a superb penman too, which was no little accomplishment in that day; withal, he excelled in athletics, and showed a skill with the long-bow which made credible the traditions about Robin Hood. They said he wasted time at this exercise; whereupon he wrote a defence of Archery, which under the name of Toxophilus has come down to our day—a model even now of good, homely, vigorous English. “He that will write well in any tongue,” said he, “must follow this counsel—to speak as the common people do—to think as wise men do.” Our teachers of rhetoric could hardly say a better thing to-day.
The subject of Archery was an important one at that period; the long-bow was still the principal war weapon of offence: there were match-locks, indeed, but these very cumbrous and counting for less than those “cloth-yard” shafts which had won the battle of Agincourt. The boy-King, Edward, to whom Ascham taught penmanship, was an adept at archery, and makes frequent allusion to that exercise in his Journal. In every hamlet practice at the long-bow was obligatory; and it was ordered by statute that no person above the age of twenty-four, should shoot the light-flight arrow at a distance under two hundred and twenty yards. What would our Archery Clubs say to this? And what, to the further order—dating in Henry VIII.’s time—that “all bow-staves should be three fingers thick and seven feet long?”
This book of Ascham’s was published two years before Henry’s death, and brought him a small pension; under the succeeding king he went to Augsburg, where Charles V. held his brilliant court; but neither there, nor in Italy, did he lose his homely and hearty English ways, and his love of English things.
In his tractate of the Schoolmaster, which appeared after his death, he bemoans the much and idle travel of Englishmen into Italy. They have a proverb there, he says, “Un Inglese italianato é un diabolo incarnato” (an Italianized Englishman is a devil incarnate). Going to Italy, when Tintoretto and Raphael were yet living, and when the great Medici family and the Borgias were spinning their golden wheels—was, for a young Englishman of that day, like a European trip to a young American of ours: Ascham says—“Many being mules and horses before they went, return swine and asses.”
There is much other piquant matter in this old book of the Schoolmaster; as where he says:—
“When the child doeth well, either in the choosing or true placing of his words, let the master praise him, and say, ‘Here ye do well!’ For I assure you there is no such whetstone to sharpen a good wit, and encourage a will to learning as is praise. But if the child miss, either in forgetting a word, or in changing a good with a worse, or mis-ordering the sentence, I would not have the master frown, or chide with him, if the child have done his diligence and used no truantship: For I know by good experience, that a child shall take more profit of two faults gently warned of, than of four things rightly hit.”
And this brings us to say that this good, canny, and thrifty Roger Ascham was the early teacher, in Greek and Latin, of the great Princess Elizabeth, and afterward for years her secretary. You would like to hear how he speaks of her:—
“It is your shame (I speak to you all young gentlemen of England) that one mind should go beyond you all in excellency of learning, and knowledge of divers tongues. Point forth six of the best given gentlemen of this court, and all they together show not so much good will, spend not so much time, bestow not so many hours daily, orderly, and constantly, for the increase of learning and knowledge as doth this Princess. Yea, I believe that beside her perfect readiness in Latin, Italian, French and Spanish, she readeth here now, at Windsor more Greek every day, than some prebendarys of this Church doth read Latin in a whole week.”