Meanwhile the common fault of men who wrote in prose was the inability to tell a plain tale; to say succinctly, distinctly, and unmistakably what they meant. Perhaps they did not always wish to be understood, but even when Elizabethan and Jacobean writers were anxious to be lucid, their fanciful tropes and long sentences often detain or defy the modern reader. This defect arose partly from imitation of the structure of stately Latin sentences in Roman literature. But in Latin the nature of the grammar does not permit the meaning to be lost. When books were comparatively rare, and leisure was plentiful, readers did not grudge the time passed over tall and massive folios and long stately involved periods. Now and again, in the age of Elizabeth as in the Restoration, the lighter authors took refuge in a style lax, colloquial, and charged with current slang. A century must pass before we arrive at the unadorned plain manner of Dean Swift. It was not that the Elizabethans lacked the power to write tersely, simply, and clearly. So luxuriant a poet as Spenser was the master of a perfectly clear and unadorned prose style, deeply interesting in his work on the condition of Ireland. The letters of such diplomatists as Randolph, Queen Elizabeth's envoy to the Court of Mary, Queen of Scots, are as clear and amusing, or, once or twice, as pathetic, to-day, as when they were written. But the prose of literature was entangled and encumbered by the search of ornament, of _esprit_ at all costs, and by copious antitheses and, among the lighter writers, by "clenches" and even by slang. Hooker. "It is not to be doubted but that Richard Hooker was born at Heavytree" (near Exeter), says Izaak Walton, about 1553. But sceptics have averred that he was born in Southgate Street, in Exeter. His parents were not rich, and, aided by Bishop Jewel, he entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1567, as a Bible Clerk. In 1577 he obtained a Fellowship; in 1579 was Reader in Hebrew, a tongue with which few Oxford men were, or are, familiarly acquainted. About four years later he took holy orders, had a severe cold, and married a wife recommended by the lady who had nursed him in his illness. "The good man," says Walton, "had no cause to rejoice in the wife of his youth," for "the contentions of a wife" (at least of Mrs. Hooker), "are a continual dropping." He took a living in Buckinghamshire, and experienced "the corroding cares that attend a married priest". Among these was reading Horace while he watched his sheep, and rocking his child's cradle.