Artists

Abstract

“Ye know not what hurt ye do to learning that care not for words but for matter,” Roger Ascham warned in his Schoolmaster (1570).¹ Similarly, Ascham approved Cicero for pondering which preposition to use, if any, in a certain phrase, even when writing during a political crisis imposing “care for his country,” amid other woes: “in those heavy times he was so careful to know this small point of grammar” (161, 160–61). On the other hand, Ascham ruefully contrasted two Cambridge dons, the first presenting numerous “tragedies” whose grave defects equally expressed “his blindness and boldness,” the second holding back a single work in the same genre, though marred but by one “small fault,” as clashing with his own “care of perfection,” and concomitant “fear and reverence of the judgment of the best learned” (139, 139, 140, 139, 139). Thus, the better example remained out of circulation, whereas the worse won undeserved applause from “many ignorant fellows” who should have known better (139). Moreover, Ascham’s own “care of perfection” often bordered on an inhibiting “fear…of…judgment.” “Some man perchance will smile and laugh to scorn this my writing, and call it idle curiosity thus to busy myself in pickling about these small points of grammar,” he fretted (160). He likewise worried about this hypothetical scenario:

Some ignorant, unlearned, and idle student, or some busy looker upon this little poor book that hath neither will to do good himself nor skill to judge right of others, but can lustily contemn by pride and ignorance all painful diligence and right order in study, will perchance say that I am too precise, too curious, in marking and piddling thus about the imitation of others, and that the old worthy authors did never busy their heads and wits in following so precisely either the matter what other men wrote or else the manner how other men wrote. (119)