Authorities on English have always recognized this, but owing to religious feelings, and the anti-Catholic tradition created during Elizabeth and James' time, More's work has been neglected, except by the deeper scholars. Samuel Johnson, in the "History of the English Language," prefixed to his dictionary, devotes nearly one-third of all the space that he takes for his purpose to More. He apologizes somewhat for his copiousness of quotation from the chancellor, but justifies it by saying that, "It is necessary to give a larger specimen both because the language was to a great degree formed and settled and because it appears from Ben Jonson that his works were considered as models of pure and elegant style."
A recent writer, [Footnote 48] Prof. J. S. Phillimore, says of More's style: [{499}] "His usual prose has the easy elastic abundance of Boccaccio and a lawyer's love of proving a point exhaustively in controversy. But he has all the qualities of a great prose style: sonorous eloquence, less cumbersome than Milton; simplicity and lucidity of argument, with unfailing sense of the rhythms and harmonies of English sound. He is a master of Dialogue, the favorite vehicle of that age; neither too curiously dramatic in the ethopoia of the persons, nor yet allowing the form to become a hollow convention, the objector in his great Dialogue (the Quod he and Quod I) is anything but a man of straw. We can see that if Lucian was his early love he had not neglected Plato either. Elizabethan prose is tawdry and mannered compared with his: at his death Chaucer's thread is dropped, which none picked up till Clarendon and Dryden. With his colloquial, well-bred, unaffected ease, he is the ancestor of Swift. His style--so Erasmus tells us--was gained by long and careful studies and exercises; he took a discipline in Latin, of which the fruits were to appear in English, when the increasing gravity of the times warned him that it would be well to speak to a larger public than Latin could reach. Even where he is prolix--and that may seem prolix in black-letter folio which reads easy and pleasant enough in modern form--his merry humor is not long silent."
[Footnote 48: Dublin Review, July, 1913.]
As in French, some of the translations into English at this period are almost as admirable prose as Amyot's "Plutarch." Even when the translations of the time have the quaintness of the English of that period, they are admirable in their closeness to the original and in a certain rhythm of their sentences. Of Berner's translation of Froissart's "Chronicles," Snell in "The Age of Transition" ("Handbooks of English Literature," Scribners) says: "The English is so thoroughly idiomatic that in reading it one loses all sensation of the book being merely an interpretation, and resigns one's self to its easy and familiar flow with the same joyful complacency as if it were an original work. On the other hand, if one insists on breaking the spell and comparing it with the French text, one is struck not only with the felicity, but also the fidelity of the rendering."
The literary quality of the prose of the first half of the [{500}] sixteenth century in England is best revealed in the translations of the Scriptures done into the vernacular at this time and in the unequalled Collects of the English Prayerbook. Tyndale and Coverdale are responsible for the translations of the Scriptures, and to Cranmer is usually attributed the writing of the Collects, though, as has been said by Saintsbury, "this attribution derives but very faint corroboration from the Archbishop's known work." It was with these models of marvellously expressive, thoroughly idiomatic English, exquisite examples of style, that the translators of the King James version of the Bible were placed in a position to give us the wonderful fundamental literary work that was to come from their hand half a century later. It has been said that one argument of the most irresistible kind for the divine authorship of the Scriptures lies in the faculty which they have of making all the translations of them great literature. It was their influence that is felt in the English Prayerbook and in those parts of the Breviary which we owe to the first half of the sixteenth century.
MANTEGNA. ST. GEORGE
CHAPTER VI
SCHOLARSHIP IN ITALY
One of the most important chapters in the great accomplishment of the men of this century is its scholarship--that is, the critical and appreciative knowledge of what men had written before their time and especially of the great classical works of antiquity. In this, almost needless to say, Italy is not only a pioneer, but was the alma mater studiorum--of whom Linacre was so proud--for those desirous of knowledge of the classics and true scholarship from all over the world. From every country, France, Spain, Germany, distant Poland and Denmark, as well as England, those looking for opportunities for study that could not be obtained at home flocked to Italy. Besides, Italian teachers are to be found teaching everywhere, though Italy herself proved no stepmother to those who came to be nurtured in good learning at her great institutions. Many a foreigner who had proved his ability was given a professorship and spent many years in teaching others in Italy as he had been taught himself.