Hence, as well as for other reasons, English criticism develops itself, if not with entire independence, yet with sufficient conformity to its own needs. That practical bent which we have noticed in the French shows itself here also; but it is conditioned differently. We had, as they had in France, to fashion a new poetic diction; but it cannot be said that the critics did much for this: Spenser, as much as Coriolanus, might have said, “Alone I did it.” They did more _in re metrica_, and it so happened that they had, quite in their own sphere, to fight an all-important battle, the battle of the classical metres, which was of nothing like the same importance in French or in Italian. In dealing with these and other matters they fall into certain generations or successive groups. In Ascham and his contemporaries the critical attitude was induced, but not altogether favourably conditioned, by certain forces, partly common to them with their Continental contemporaries, partly not. They all felt, in a degree most creditable to themselves (and contrasting most favourably with the rather opposite feeling of men so much greater and so much later as Bacon and Hobbes), that they must adorn their Sparta, that it was their business to get the vernacular into as good working order, both for prose and verse, as they possibly could. And what is more, they had some shrewd notions about the best way of doing this. The exaggerated rhetoric and “aureateness” of the fifteenth century had inspired them, to a man, with a horror of “inkhorn terms,” and, if mainly wrong, they were also partly right in feeling that the just and deserved popularity of the early printed editions of the whole of Chaucer threatened English with an undue dose of archaism.