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And since I have borrowed the quotation from Professor Krapp I shall bring this rambling paper to an end by borrowing another, from the Toxophilus of Roger Ascham . 'He that will wryte well in any tongue must folowe this council of Aristotle, to speake as the common people do, to think as wise men do.
Ascham's Schoolmaster, as well as his earlier book, Toxophilus, a Platonic dialogue on archery, bristles with quotations from the Greek and Latin classics, and with that perpetual reference to the authority of antiquity on every topic that he touches, which remained the fashion in all serious prose down to the time of Dryden.
The Compleat Angler, though not the first piece of sporting literature in English, is unquestionably the most popular, and still remains a favorite with "all that are lovers of virtue, and dare trust in Providence, and be quiet, and go a-angling." As in Ascham's Toxophilus, the instruction is conveyed in dialogue form, but the technical part of the book is relieved by many delightful digressions.
He appears to have been not much qualified for the improvement of his fortune. His disposition was kind and social; he delighted in the pleasures of conversation, and was probably not much inclined to business. This may be suspected from the paucity of his writings. He has left little behind him; and of that little, nothing was published by himself but the Toxophilus, and the account of Germany.
How antagonistic the new classical culture was to the vanished ideal of the Middle Age may be read in Toxophilus, a treatise on archery published in 1545, by Roger Ascham, a Greek lecturer in Cambridge, and the tutor of the Princess Elizabeth and of Lady Jane Grey: "In our forefathers' time, when papistry as a standing pool covered and overflowed all England, few books were read in our tongue saving certain books of chivalry, as they said, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in monasteries by idle monks or wanton canons: as one, for example, Morte Arthure, the whole pleasure of which book standeth in two special points, in open manslaughter and bold bawdry.
Firearms were then in their infancy; and though battering-pieces had been some time in use, I know not whether any soldiers were armed with hand-guns when the Toxophilus was first published.
And while from all these points of view his letters have interest, there is one thing about them which is perhaps more interesting to us than any other: and that is the fact that while he begins to write in Latin the all but mother-tongue of all scholars of the time, and the universal language of the educated, even when not definitely scholarly, throughout Europe he exchanges this for English latterly, in the same spirit which prompted his famous expression of reasons for writing the Toxophilus in our own and his own tongue.
The chest is held rigid in a position of moderate inspiration, the back muscles are set and every tendon is drawn into elastic strain; in fact, to be successful, the whole act should be characterized by the utmost vigor. To get the best instructions for shooting the bow, one should read Sir Roger Ascham in Toxophilus, and Horace Ford on Archery.
Editions: of Toxophilus, Arber; Schoolmaster, Arber, also Mayer ; English works, Bennet , with life by Dr. Eccentric writer, student at the Middle Temple, 1686, and called to the Bar 1692.
To free himself from this censure was one of the reasons for which he published, in 1544, his Toxophilus, or the Schole or Partitions of Shooting, in which he joins the praise with the precepts of archery.
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