The chief representative of this school is, however, beyond question, the always agreeable, and but seldom other than admirable, author of _Toxophilus_ and _The Schoolmaster_ himself.[213] [Sidenote: _Ascham._] His positive achievements in English literature do not here directly concern us; nor does the debate between those who regard him as a Euphuist before Euphuism, and those who will have him to be the chief example of the plain style in early Elizabethan literature. I confess myself to be on the side of the latter; though I know what the former mean. But it is with what Ascham thought as a critic, not with what he did as a writer, that we are here busy; and on this there is no reasonable opening for serious difference of opinion. Ascham’s critical position and opinions are clear, not only from his two famous and pleasant little books, but from the constant literary references in his letters, ranging from elaborate lucubrations on the study of the classics to an amusing little Cambridge fling at the older university, where, as we learn from a letter of exactly the middle of the century, taste was in so shocking a condition that Oxford men actually paid more attention to Lucian and Apuleius than to Cicero and Xenophon.[214] ----- Footnote 213: For these two books Mr Arber’s excellent reprints can hardly be bettered. But for our purposes the _Letters_ are also needed; and these, with other things, will be found in Giles’s edition of the _Works_, 3 vols. in 4, London, 1864-65. Footnote 214: _Quid omnes Oxonienses sequuntur plane nescio, sed ante aliquot menses in Aula incidi in quendam illius Academiæ, qui nimium præferendo Lucianum, Plutarchum et Herodianum, Senecam, A. Gellium, et Apuleium utramque linguam in nimis senescentem et effœtam ætatem compingere mihi videbatur_—Giles, i. 190. The whole letter (to Sturm) is worth reading. ----- [Sidenote: _His patriotism._] The _Toxophilus_ itself is a critical document in parts, both for the initial manifesto of his desire “to write this English matter in the English tongue for English men,” and for the more elaborate defence of the proceeding (a defence repeated in the numerous Latin letters accompanying the copies of the book he sent to his friends), as well as for one of those hits at Romance which were characteristic of Renaissance scholars too generally, and were particularly to be expected in very moral and rather prosaic persons like Ascham. But we necessarily turn to the _Schoolmaster_ for a full exposition of Ascham’s critical _ethos_, and we find it.