Wilson’s _Art of Rhetoric_[204] is, as the other dates given in the text and notes will show sufficiently, by no means the first book of the school; nor is it that which has, on the whole, the most interest for us. [Sidenote: _Wilson: his_ Art of Rhetoric;] But it deserves precedence historically because, as no other does, it keys, or gears, the new critical tendency on to the old technical rhetoric. The first edition appeared in 1553, dedicated to Edward VI. Wilson dates his prologue to the second[205] on the 7th December 1560; but it does not seem to have been published till 1563. Between the date of the first edition and the writing of this Prologue, Wilson, an exile at Rome, had fallen into the claws of the Inquisition as author of the book and of another on Logic; and, as he recounts with natural palpitation, escaped literally “so as by fire,” his prison-house being in flames. ----- Footnote 204: It was not actually the first in English, Leonard Coxe having preceded him “about 1524” with an English adaptation, apparently, of Melanchthon. But this is of no critical importance. Footnote 205: My copy is of this, which is the fuller. ----- His two first Books Wilson faithfully devotes to all the old technicalities—Invention, Disposition, Amplification, “States,” and the rest. [Sidenote: _his attack on “Inkhorn terms.”_] But his third Book, “Of Elocution,”[206] announces from the first an interest in the matter very different from the jejune rehashings of the ancients (and chiefly of those ancients least worth rehashing) which the mediæval Rhetorics mostly give us. In fact, Wilson had shown himself alive to the importance of the subject in the very opening of the work itself[207] by recounting, with much gusto, how “Phavorinus the Philosopher (as Gellius telleth the tale) did hit a young man over the thumbs very handsomely for using over-old and over-strange words.” And as soon as he has divided the requirements of Elocution under the four heads of Plainness, Aptness, Composition, and Exornation, he opens the stop which has been recognised as his characteristic one, by denouncing “strange inkhorn terms.” He inveighs against the “far-journeyed gentlemen” who, on their return home, as they love to go in foreign apparel, so they “powder their talk with oversea language,” one talking French-English, another “chopping in” with English-Italianated. Professional men, lawyers and auditors, have their turn of censure, and a real literary “document” follows in the censure of the “fine courtier who will talk nothing but Chaucer.” Most copious is he against undue “Latining” of the tongue, in illustration of which he gives a letter from a Lincolnshire gentleman which may owe royalty either to the Limousin Scholar of Rabelais, or even to Master Francis’ own original, Geoffrey Tory himself. And he points the same moral (very much after the manner of Latimer, for whom, as elsewhere appears, he had a great admiration) by divers facetious