Cheke has left no considerable English work, and he seems—as it is perhaps inevitable that at least some of the leaders in every period of innovation should seem—to have pushed innovation itself to and over the verge of crotchet. [Sidenote: _Cheke: his resolute Anglicism and anti-preciosity._] He was a spelling and pronouncing reformer both in Greek and English; and, classical scholar and teacher as he was, he seems to have fallen in with that curious survival of “Saxon” rendering of words not of Saxon origin, the great storehouse of which is the work of Reginald Pecock a century earlier. But he appears to have been one of the main and most influential sources of the double stream of tendency observable in Wilson himself, and still more in Ascham—the tendency on the one hand to use the classics as models and trainers in the formation of a generally useful and practicable English style, and on the other to insist that neither from classical nor from any other sources should English be adulterated by “inkhorn terms,” as Wilson calls them,[209] of any kind—that is to say, by archaisms, technicalities, preciousnesses, fished up as it were from the bottom of the ink-pot, instead of simply and naturally taken as they came from its surface to the pen. What Ascham tells us that he said of Sallust is the spirit, the centre, the kernel, of the criticism of the whole school—a dread that is to say, and a dislike and a censure of what he calls the “uncontented care to write better than he could.”[210] And it must be obvious that this sharply formulated censure is itself a critical _point de repère_ of the greatest value. It is well that it was not too much listened to—for the greatest results of English prose and verse in the great period, beginning a few years after Cheke’s death and continuing for an old man’s lifetime, were the result of this “never contented care,” which still reached something better than content. But if, at this early period, it had had too much way given to it, if the vigorous but somewhat sprawling infancy of Elizabethan English had been bid and let sprawl simply at its pleasure, the consequences could not but have been disastrous. ----- Footnote 209: Not that the phrase is of his invention. It seems to have been a catchword of the time, and occurs in Bale (1543), in Peter Ashton’s version of Jovius (1546), &c. Footnote 210: Of course Cheke had in his mind the passage of Quintilian concerning Julius Florus (_v. supra_, i. 313). -----