Yet the writers who were content to be as plain and downright as Ascham do not require many words. Such treatises as Webbe’s _Discourse of English Poetrie_, printed in 1586, or the _Arte of English Poesie_, published in 1589, and attributed to George Puttenham by Carew in 1614, are interesting, but it cannot be said that they hold an important place in English literature, or had any considerable effect. The _Arte of English Poesie_ is indeed a very sane and thorough critical treatise, one proof among others that if so many of the Elizabethan writers were wild and shapeless, it was not because none in their time thought wisely on questions of literary principle and of form. The explanation of their extravagance may be more safely looked for elsewhere. When Nash was reproached for his “boisterous compound words,” he answered, “That no wind that blows strong but is boisterous, no speech or words of any power or force to confute, or persuade, but must be swelling and boisterous.” This is Brantôme’s excuse for the rodomontade, that superb and swelling words go well with daring deeds. The Elizabethans were so vehement and headlong, that they sought naturally for the “word of power,” for the altisonant and ear-filling in language, and were more tolerant of bombast than of the pedestrian. [SN: _The sentence._] Their general inability to confine themselves to the sentence may be excused on the same ground. They felt so much, and so strongly, that they could not stop to disentangle and arrange. Certainly if Englishmen sinned in this respect it was against the light. Models were not wanting to them, and they were not unaware of the virtue of being clear and coherent. Whoever the author of Martin Marprelate’s _Epistle_ may have been--Penry, Udall, Barrow, or another--he knew a bad sentence as well as any of the Queen Anne men. He fixes, as any of them might have done, on the confused heap of clauses which did duty for sentences in Dean John Bridges’s _Defence of the Government of the Church of England_. “And learned brother Bridges,” he writes, “a man might almost run himself out of breath before he could come to a full point in many places in your book. Page 69, line 3, speaking of the extraordinary gifts in the Apostles’ time, you have this sweet learning,[77] ‘Yea some of them have for a great part of the time, continued even till our times, and yet continue, as the operation of great works, or if they mean miracles, which were not ordinary, no not in that extraordinary time, and as the hypocrites had them, so might and had divers of the Papists, and yet their cause never the better, and the like may we say of the gifts of speaking with tongues which have not been with study before learned, as Anthony, &c., and divers also among the ancient fathers, and some among the Papists, and some among us, have not been destitute of the gifts of prophesying, and much more may I say this of the gift of healing, for none of those