His kinsman's presence accounts in a measure for this early going (he started most of his life's enterprises under their shelter, though in the end he grew to overtop them), but his quick wit was another and the chief reason. Old Ascham begs the fond schoolmaster to modify his propensity for caning, and to discriminate between "the harde witte and the quicke witte. But this I will say, that even the wisest of your great beaters do as oft punishe nature as they do correcte faultes. Yea, many times the better nature is sorer punished; for if one by quicknes of witte take his lesson readelie, another by hardnes of witte taketh it not speedilie: the first is alwaies commended, the other is commonlie punished, when a wise schoolmaster should ... not so much wey what either of them is able to do now, as what either of them is likelie to do hereafter." He will have none of the quick wit. Slow and sure is his adage. To him quick wits are "even like over-sharpe tooles whose edges be verie soone turned." And Ascham was the Queen's tutor, and was striking out a new line in his theme, in his treatment of it and in his language. For a scholar of his calibre to write of the education of little boys, and to write of it in English (fine English it is, too, with its balanced cadences), demanded profuse apologies, which he is not slow to offer, and to offer at full length in his preface. No apology would be necessary now, when Education Bills have been known to overturn Governments, or even a very few years later than Ascham himself; but in Ascham's actual day, Latin was regarded as the language of the learned, and dignity, which Ascham never lost, an attribute of learning. His remarks are always judicious, and his summing up of the temperament, which he calls the quick wit, is brilliant if not final. It is in the nature of generalization to be limited. For there are many wits where quickness and hardness, which he distinguishes so sharply, are as memorably, as in the case of young Ralegh, combined--"sharpe tooles" whose edges be never turned. Such incontestably was Ralegh. His mind and his character (the motive force) were on the same level of strength; neither preyed on the other, and he lived in a time when the world offered scope, as never perhaps in quite the same way before or since, to the resistless energy of united strength.