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Rh alive againrising and againbirth. His pupil Ascham made head against the foreign rubbish, which ‘did make all thinges darke and hard.’ Wilson in 1550 branded the ‘strange ynkehorne terms’ of his day. One part of his criticism may be most earnestly recom&shy;mended to the fine writers of our own time. ‘Some seke so farre for outlandishe Englishe, that thei for&shy;gette altogether their mothers' language. . . . He that commeth lately out of France, will talke Frenche-En&shy;glish, and never blush at the matter. The unlearned or foolishe phantasticall that smelles but of learnyng will so Latin their toungues that the simple cannot but wonder at their talke and thinke surely thei speake by some revelacion. I know them that thinke Rhetorique to stand whollie upon darke woordes, and he that can catche an ynke horne terme by the taile, hym thei coumpt to be a fine Englishman and a good Rheto&shy;rician.’ In spite of all these drawbacks, Mulcaster wrote thus in 1583: ‘The English tung cannot prove fairer than it is at this day.’ He was a rash soothsayer, and little knew what was to be the literary history of the next thirty years.

I have dwelt much on Manning, Chaucer, and Caxton; but it was three Englishmen, writing within ninety years after 1525, who had the honour of settling the form of our speech for ever. I have spoken of Tyndale and Cran&shy;mer; Shakespere, the employer of no fewer than 15,000 English words, was yet to come. It would be hopeless