Thomas Wilson, who dedicated his translation of Demosthenes to Sir William Cecil in 1570, links himself with the earlier group of translators by his detailed references to Cheke. Like Norton he is very conscious of the difficulty of translation. "I never found in my life," he writes of this piece of work, "anything so hard for me to do." "Such a hard thing it is," he adds later, "to bring matter out of any one language into another." A vigorous advocate of translation, however, he does not despise his own tongue. "The cunning is no less," he declares, "and the praise as great in my judgment, to translate anything excellently into English, as into any other language," and he hopes that, if his own attempt proves unsuccessful, others will make the trial, "that such an orator as this is might be so framed to speak our tongue as none were able to amend him, and that he might be found to be most like himself." Wilson comes to his task with all the equipment that the period could afford; his preface gives evidence of a critical acquaintance with numerous Latin renderings of his author. From Cheke, however, he has gained something more valuable, the power to feel the vital, permanent quality in the work of Demosthenes. Cheke, he says, "was moved greatly to like Demosthenes above all others, for that he saw him so familiarly applying himself to the sense and understanding of the common people, that he sticked not to say that none ever was more fit to make an Englishman tell his tale praiseworthily in any open hearing either in parliament or in pulpit or otherwise, than this only orator was." Wilson shares this opinion and, representative of the changing standards of Elizabethan scholarship, prefers Demosthenes to Cicero. "Demosthenes used a plain, familiar manner of writing and speaking in all his actions," he says in his _Preface to the Reader_, "applying himself to the people's nature and to their understanding without using of proheme to win credit or devising conclusion to move affections and to purchase favor after he had done his matters.... And were it not better and more wisdom to speak plainly and nakedly after the common sort of men in few words, than to overflow with unnecessary and superfluous eloquence as Cicero is thought sometimes to do." "Never did glass so truly represent man's face," he writes later, "as Demosthenes doth show the world to us, and as it was then, so is it now, and will be so still, till the consummation and end of all things shall be." From Cheke Wilson has received also training in methods of translation and especially in the handling of the vernacular. "Master Cheke's judgment was great," he recalls, "in translating out of one tongue into another, and better skill he had in our English speech to judge of the phrases and properties of words and to divide sentences than any one else that I have known. And often he would English his matters out of the Latin or Greek upon the sudden, by looking of the