Page:Arte or Crafte of Rhethoryke - 1899.djvu/31

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Cox\ Arte or ( >,///v of Rhtthoryk< ;art his own com-

position. It i % as h<- frankly avows, lar, ded upon the work

of another. "1 haue partcly traunslaud out of a Source werkc of Rhetoryke wryttcn in the lattyn tongue, and

ly i ompylrd uf myiir ownr, .Hid > made a lytlc

ttratiM- 111 maiu-r <>f an introducivon into this aforesaid < that in the cnglysshe tongue."' And later, in the .-ion/'

Hut nowe I haue folowed tl. illy, who made

a seuerall werke of inuencion."' however is not Cox's

ehiei authority, nor does he seem to have taken very much d. out of Cicero's rhetom al writings. 1 he "werkc of Khetoryke wryt- tcn in the lattyn tongue" out of which < lates and on which his work is mainly founded is tip utioncs Rhetorical" of Melancluhon, published in 1521. Mclamhthon i> "oure amtour," so frequently referred to in the course of Cox's work. 4 Readers of Professor ('. II. Ilerford's scholarly work on the ///<V,/M- Relation* of Jttig/itHi/ <//.</ (idmany in the Sixteenth ( ire aware how close was the connection ot h and German scholarship and letters in the first half of that century. Cox, like thon, was an educator and humanist, and inclined to the reformed religious doctrine, while his failure to mention Melanchthon's name anywhere is doubtless to be attributed to the prejudice against the German reformers in high quarters in Kngland at this moment. When the idea of bringing out a work on the Art of Rhetoric written in Eng- lish first occurred to Cox, it was natural that he should turn to the convenient compendium of the subject recently written by the great humanist educator and religious reformer of Germany, with whom, probably enough, he had already come in contact on the continent. In 1519 Melanchthon had written a larger work on rhetoric, his DC rhttorica, libri tres? to which Cox refers two or three times, and

1 Infra, p. 42. P. 87.

3 See, however, infra p. 103.

< See Modern Language Notts, May 1898, where I have described my discov- ery of the source of Cox's A'^r/.

s At Wittenberg : reprinted at Basle in the same year ; at Leipzig i Cologne 1521; and Paris 1527 and 1529. Cf. Bretschneider, Corfms Kefor- matorum, Halle 1834 f. (the first 28 volumes comprise the works of Melanchthon;

the rhetorical writings are in Vol. Xlll).

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