English criticism, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, passed through five more or less distinct stages of development. The first stage, characterized by the purely rhetorical study of literature, may be said to begin with Leonard Coxe's _Arte or Crafte of Rhetoryke_, a hand-book for young students, compiled about 1524, chiefly from one of the rhetorical treatises of Melanchthon.[437] This was followed by Wilson's _Arte of Rhetorike_ (1553), which is more extensive and certainly more original than Coxe's manual, and which has been called by Warton "the first book or system of criticism in our language." But the most important figure of this period is Roger Ascham. The educational system expounded in his _Scholemaster_, written between 1563 and 1568, he owed largely to his friend, John Sturm, the Strasburg humanist, and to his teacher, Sir John Cheke, who had been Greek lecturer at the University of Padua; but for the critical portions of this work he seems directly indebted to the rhetorical treatises of the Italians.[438] Yet his obligations to the Italian humanists did not prevent the expression of his stern and unyielding antagonism to the romantic Italian spirit as it influenced the imaginative literature of his time. In studying early English literature it must always be kept in mind that the Italian Renaissance influenced the Elizabethan age in two different directions. The Italianization of English poetry had been effected, or at least begun, by the publication of Tottel's _Miscellany_ in 1557; on this, the creative side of English literature, the Italian influence was distinctly romantic. The influence of the Italian humanists, on the other hand, was directly opposed to this romantic spirit; even in their own country they had antagonized all that was not classical in tendency. Ascham, therefore, as a result of his humanistic training, became not only the first English man of letters, but also the first English classicist. The first stage of English criticism, then, was entirely given up to rhetorical study. It was at this time that English writers first attained the appreciation of form and style as distinguishing features of literature; and it was to this appreciation that the formation of an English prose style was due. This period may therefore be compared with the later stages of Italian humanism in the fifteenth century; and the later humanists were the masters and models of these early English rhetoricians. Gabriel Harvey, as a Ciceronian of the school of Bembo, was perhaps their last representative.