Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DIALOGUES OF J. L. VIVES The Poverty Of The Vernacular Literature Before The Tudor Period It is difficult to realise the position of the student of literature in England in the first half of the sixteenth century. The whole wealth of the Elizabethan writers, and all their successors in the Ages of Milton, of Dryden and Pope, of Samuel Johnson, of Charles Lamb, of Shelley, Byron, and Wordsworth, and the large range of Victorian literature, all this had to come. The modern man, therefore, must confess that it was not to English literature that the Tudor student could look for the material of education. Even if it be justifiable to claim that modern literature is a more fruitful study than ancient literature, for the ordinary man, the question remains: How was the ordinary educated man to be trained in the earlier Tudor Age, when the time of great modern literature was " not yet"? Before we can understand the function served by a Latin text-book of boys' dialogues like the work of Vives translated in this volume, we must, therefore, first realise the poverty of the vernacular literature of periods anterior to the sixteenth century, and the consequent delight of scholars in finding Latin and Greek literature ready to hand. " There is every reason to believe that the English language, before the invention of printing, was held by learned or literary men in very little esteem. In the library of Glastonbury Abbey, which bids fair to have been one of themost extensive in the kingdom in 1248, there were but four books in English, and those upon religious subjects, all beside velusta et inutilia. We have not a single historian in English prose before the reign of Richard II., when John Trevisa translated the Polychronicon of Randulph Higden. Boston of B... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.