It is not surprising that in the presence of these unsatisfying things, and in the nonage of catholic literary criticism, men should have turned for help to those classics which were the general teachers and helpers of the time. [Sidenote: _The temptations of Criticism in this respect._] There was indeed—already published just as Ascham had attained his year of discretion—a treatise, by the greatest man of letters for some fifteen hundred years at least, which contained the germ of a warning. But it is not likely that Ascham or any of his good Cambridge friends had seen Trissino’s translation of the _De Vulgari Eloquio_; and, if any had, it would have been a stroke of genius to carry Dante’s generalisation from the Romance tongues further. To almost any man of the Renaissance it would have seemed half sacrilege and half madness to examine ancient and modern literatures on the same plane, and decide what was germane to each and what common to all. Greek Prosody had been good enough, with very minor alterations, for Latin; how should any of these upstart modern tongues refuse what had been good enough for both? And let it be remembered, too, that they were only half wrong. Greek and Latin _did_ provide up to a certain point—that of the foot as distinguished from the metre—examples which, duly guarded, could be quite safely followed, which indeed could not and cannot be neglected without loss and danger for English. It was when they went further, and endeavoured to impose the classical combinations of feet on English, that they fell. Yet even from the first they had glimpses and glimmerings of truth which might have warned them; while in their very errors they often display that combination of independence and practical spirit which is the too often undervalued glory of English criticism. [Sidenote: _Its adventurers: Ascham himself._] Ascham himself—besotted as he is with wrath[221] against “our rude beggarly rhyming,” confident as he is that the doggerel of his old friend Bishop Watson of Lincoln— “All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses, For that he knew many men’s manners, and saw many cities,”—