eside other discommodities, take all place and
occasion from all amendment. And this I speak generally of use
and custom."

* * * * *

"Time was when Italy and Rome have been, to the great good of us
who now live, the best breeders and bringers up of the worthiest
men, not only for wise speaking, but also for well-doing in all
civil affairs that ever was in the world. But now that time is
gone; and though the place remain, yet the old and present
manners do differ as far as black and white, as virtue and vice.
Virtue once made that country mistress over all the world: vice
now maketh that country slave to them that before were glad to
serve it. All man [_i.e._ mankind] seeth it; they themselves
confess it, namely such as be best and wisest amongst them. For
sin, by lust and vanity, hath and doth breed up everywhere common
contempt of God's word, private contention in many families, open
factions in every city; and so making themselves bond to vanity
and vice at home, they are content to bear the yoke of serving
strangers abroad. Italy now is not that Italy it was wont to be;
and therefore now not so fit a place as some do count it for
young men to fetch either wisdom or honesty from thence. For
surely they will make others but bad scholars that be so ill
masters to themselves."

This same characteristic, or absence of characteristic, which reaches its
climax--a climax endowing it with something like substantive life and
merit--in Hooker, displays itself, with more and more admixture of raciness
and native peculiarity, in almost all the prose of the early Elizabethan
period up to the singular escapade of Lyly, who certainly tried to write
not a classical style but a style of his own. The better men, with Thomas
Wilson and Ascham himself at their head, made indeed earnest protests
against Latinising the vocabulary (the great fault of the contemporary
French _Pleiade_), but they were not quite aware how much they were under
the influence of Latin in other matters. The translators, such as North,
whose famous version of Plutarch after Amyot had the immortal honour of
suggesting not a little of Shakespere's greatest work, had the chief excuse
and temptation in doing this; but all writers did it more or less: the
theologians (to whom it would no doubt have been "more easier" to write in
La