But Ascham's pleading, though many others spoke to the same effect,[33] had very little result. Learned and well informed as he was, his "conservatism" in all things was so intense that much might be laid to the account of this tendency of his mind. Had he not written that "his soul had such an horror of English or Latin books containing new doctrines that, except the psalter and the New Testament, this last, too, in the Greek text, he had never taken any book, 'either small or big,' to use Plato's words, concerning Christian religion"?[34] Had he not recommended the bow as, even in those gunpowder times, the best weapon in war? "If I were of authority, I would counsel all the gentlemen and yeomen of England not to change it with any other thing, how good soever it seems to be; but that still, according to the old wont of England, youths should use it for the most honest pastime in peace, that men might handle it as a most sure weapon in war."[35] The other "strong weapons" must not lead men to forget this one: a thing they have nevertheless done. Nothing dismayed by the threat of the dire consequences of Circe's wiles, travellers eager to see her crowded to the south. They continued not to "exchewe the way to Circes court, but go & ryde & runne & flie thether."[36] No education was complete without a sojourn on the continent. Surrey, Wyatt, Sidney, penniless Robert Greene, and hundreds if not thousands of others went there. There was an eagerness to see and to learn that no sight and no knowledge could satisfy, that no threat nor sermon could stop. Paris, Venice, Rome, Vienna, the Low Countries, received an ever-increasing flood of English visitors. II. England in her turn, not to mention the classics of antiquity that were being speedily translated, was flooded with French, Spanish, and Italian books, again to the great dismay of good Ascham. If "Morte d'Arthur" was bad, nothing worse could well be imagined than Italian books in general. "Ten 'Morte d'Arthures' do not the tenth part so much harme as one of these bookes made in Italie and translated in England." They are to be found "in every shop in London," and each of them can do more mischief than ten sermons at St. Paul's Cross can do good. They introduce into the land such refinements in vice "as the single head of an Englishman is not hable to invent."[37] [Illustration: FRONTISPIECE TO HARINGTON'S TRANSLATION OF ARIOSTO, 1591, BY COXON AND GIROLAMO PORRO.]