[212]. This may be found in Arber’s Introduction to the book just cited, p. 5; or in Professor Raleigh’s ed. of Hoby (London, 1900), pp. 12, 13.
[213]. For these two books Mr Arber’s excellent reprints can hardly be bettered. But for our purposes the Letters are also needed; and these, with other things, will be found in Giles’s edition of the Works, 3 vols. in 4, London, 1864-65.
[214]. Quid omnes Oxonienses sequuntur plane nescio, sed ante aliquot menses in Aula incidi in quendam illius Academiæ, qui nimium præferendo Lucianum, Plutarchum et Herodianum, Senecam, A. Gellium, et Apuleium utramque linguam in nimis senescentem et effœtam ætatem compingere mihi videbatur—Giles, i. 190. The whole letter (to Sturm) is worth reading.
[215]. P. 19, ed. Arber. The passage contains a stroke at monasticism.
[216]. P. 80, ed. Arber.
[217]. Thought to be his last, and written in Dec. 1568; ed. Giles, ii. 189. The correspondence with Sturm is, as we should expect, particularly literary.
[220]. There had, of course, been some charming jets of folk-song in ballad, carol, and what not.
[221]. It is curious that, in this very début of English criticism, the incivility with which critics are constantly and too justly charged makes its appearance. Ascham would seem to have been a good-natured soul enough. Yet he abuses rhyme and its partisans in the true “Père Duchêne” style which some critics still affect. “To follow the Goths in rhyming instead of the Greeks in versifying” is “to eat acorns with swine, when we may eat wheat bread among men.” Rhymers are “a rude multitude,” “rash, ignorant heads,” “wandering blindly in their foul wrong way,” &c.