Highlights from OHEL

1. About Roger Ascham (1515-68)
The Schoolmaster, posthumously published in 1570, occupied the last years of Ascham's life. Its starting-point was a conversation in 1563 about some Eton boys who had run away 'for feare of beating.' This provoked from Ascham, to his lasting glory, a protest (I think the first in English) against cruelty in teaching.

2. On Reproducing Conversations
William Roper (1496-1578) in small compass produced a masterpiece. In narrative his prose may sometimes be a little heavy, but his dialogue is excellent. He shares with Boswell the power of giving to reported conversation that appearance of reality which we demand of conversations in fiction. The gift is extremely rare...and it has every right to be regarded as a literary gift. Roper also shares Boswell's humility; he will cast himself for the fool's part if the anecdote demands it.

3. Hooker on the Natural Law
The Ethnikes (albeit they had nod the right and perfite true knowlage of God) were endued with the knowlage of the lawe of nature. For it is no priuate lawe to a fewe or certain people but common to all; nor written in bokes but graffed in the heartes of men; not made by man but ordained of God; which we haue not learned, receaued, or redde but haue taken, sucked, and drawne it out of nature; wuherevnto we are not taught but made.

4. Thomas Wilson Coins a Phrase
The style is occasionally adorned with verbal tricks ('These be marmaides not merchants') or with alliteration ('As deafe as a doore nayle, as blynde as a bittle.')

5. CSL's Opinion of John Leland
His Latin poetry has been praised, but I cannot think that a man who would use such a metre as the hendecasyllable for a poem seven hundred lines long was really very sensitive.

6. William Harrison's Historical Sources
In some respects he was not very well qualified for the work. His account of Scotland is merely an Anglicization of Bellenden's Scots version of Boece. Even in England he was not a great traveller and researcher like Leland or Stow. He relies on many sources--Leland himself, Smith, Bale, Harman, Humphrey Lloyd, Dr. Caius On English Dogs, and that inaccurate but never uninteresting authority 'old men yet dwelling in the village where I remain.'

7. Early Roots of the Modern Novel
The novella, from which matter had often been borrowed before, enters English literature as a form with the work of Painter, Fenton, and Pettie. Of this form the modern critic is apt to make demands which it never attempted to satisfy: he is half angry with the authors for not developing it in the direction of the modern novel. But except in so far as it marks the appearance of story-telling naked and unashamed, story-telling without roots in legend or supposed history, the novella seems to have little connexion with later developments of fiction. It is an elaboration of the oral anecdote. Interest is concentrated on what happened: character, sentiment, manners, and atmosphere exist only for the sake of the event. In English its historical function was not to produce higher forms of fiction but to serve as a dung or compost for the popular drama. Its anecdotal character perhaps explains its tendency to become either licentious or bloodcurdling.