SOURCE: Wilson, H. S. “Gabriel Harvey's Orations on Rhetoric.” ELH 12, no. 3 (September 1945): 167-82.

[In the following essay, Wilson offers a comparative analysis of two lectures by Harvey, Rhetor and Ciceronianus, and judges them “fine examples of polished Renaissance Latinity that compare favorably with the best Latin orations published on the continent.”]

1

Gabriel Harvey's three Latin orations on rhetoric, published by the well-known London printer, Henry Bynneman, in 1577 under the titles of Ciceronianus and Rhetor, afford one of the most significant clues to the rhetorical ideas and practices of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The Ciceronianus was published first, in June of 1577, and the two orations which compose the Rhetor¹ in November of the same year.² Actually, however, the Rhetor was delivered as a lecture at Cambridge University in the spring of 1575, probably at the Bachelors' Commencement, which took place in March; and the Ciceronianus about a year later, near the beginning of the Easter term, 1576. The evidence for this dating is given in the present writer's introduction to the Ciceronianus, soon to be published in the University of Nebraska Studies.³

Both the Rhetor and the Ciceronianus are closely connected in thought and reciprocally illustrate Harvey's doctrine and practice as Praelector or Professor of Rhetoric at Cambridge between 1574 and 1576—the period during which Harvey delivered these orations, in some form, as lectures before the first-year students of the University (for whom rhetoric was the required study), and any senior members of the University who cared to attend.⁴ Harvey's orations were probably carefully revised and expanded before he sent them to press in 1577.⁵ He does, to be sure, tell William Lewin, in the prefatory letter to the Ciceronianus, that this work is only a hasty composition “such as I was able to throw together in about five days.”⁶ But Harvey's little stratagems for impressing the public in print are well-known,⁷ and we need not take this statement too seriously.

In a way, then, the Rhetor and the Ciceronianus may be regarded as essentially contemporaneous—that is, neither work was published until Harvey had relinquished his praelectorship in rhetoric, and both are the fruit of his mature reflection and experience as a teacher. And they are remarkably homogeneous in the rhetorical doctrines and methods they advocate. I suspect that Harvey chose the Ciceronianus for prior publication partly, at least, because he thought it on the whole better suited to make a favorable first impression. It is a single oration, only about half the length of the two lectures that compose the Rhetor. The Ciceronianus is a little the broader in scope: though its immediate theme is advice about the choice of rhetorical models for imitation, this consideration leads Harvey to reveal his whole conception of how the trivium should be taught; while the Rhetor is exclusively concerned with the doctrines of rhetoric. The Ciceronianus is also a more finished oration, mounting to a fine climax in the peroration; while the Rhetor ends in a slight anticlimax of desultory remarks. The Ciceronianus is, finally, the “safer” work, for the Rhetor has a larger share of Harvey's exuberance, not to say indiscretion, and is in one way the more interesting on that account. But neither treatise is a timid or conservative performance. Both works are fine examples of polished Renaissance Latinity that compare favorably with the best Latin orations published on the continent. Apart from their historical interest, I for one find them very readable.

My purpose in what follows is to make a brief comparative analysis of the two works.

2

The Ciceronianus opens with an account of Harvey's studious leisure, during his recent absence from the University, at his “Tusculan villa”⁸—a rather grandiose designation for his father's house at Saffron Walden, as it later seemed to the author of Pedantius. While he was studying and preparing his lectures at Saffron Walden, Harvey says, he read over some of the best Latin writers of antiquity: Caesar and Sallust; Virgil, Horace, and Ovid; and some of more recent times: Sturmius, Manutius, Osorius, Sigonius, Buchanan. But time and again he found himself returning to Cicero as the most truly satisfying, the supreme master among them all. The allusion to Cicero affords him the opportunity of launching upon his opening tribute—a panegyric in which Harvey pulls out all the stops of hyperbole, all his most elegant tropes and figures to celebrate the fame of the Renaissance god of eloquence.

The extravagant vein of this and other panegyrics upon Cicero scattered through the oration should not, I think, be charged to Harvey's bad taste. It is clear that in Harvey's day Cicero's reputation was supreme at Cambridge, as Bacon was later to remark.⁹ Such a panegyric was expected of anyone speaking upon the Ciceronian eloquence—and Harvey was not the man to balk at superlatives. Most Renaissance humanists cultivated the vein of florid panegyric as enthusiastically as they did that of violent abuse. Harvey was young and very enthusiastic, and his devotion to Cicero as the supreme model of eloquence seems to be completely sincere.

The praise of Cicero leads Harvey naturally to recall the growth of his own Ciceronian taste and his efforts in pursuit of the Ciceronian eloquence. In the most amusing section of the whole oration—and the account, based though it is upon Erasmus's portrait of the Ciceronian Nosoponus, is independently spirited and very good indeed—Harvey describes his youthful adherence to the Ciceronian school of Cortesius and Bembo, his painful efforts to follow the letter of Cicero's example, to be more catholic than the Pope:

Long since I laid claim to the name of a Ciceronian [he writes], and considered this title the highest honor and glory. I firmly agreed with those who taught that Marcus Tully alone should be imitated, forever and everywhere; and who believed that in him reposed the fortunes of eloquence and letters. I readily accepted the idea of those Italians who held that all other writers should be neglected and Cicero alone kept in one's hands. Neither Bembus, nor Sadoletus, nor Longolius, nor Riccius the trumpeter of Longolius, thought of Cicero with greater awe nor magnified him more than I. … I was confirmed in the sect of the Ciceronians and thought that name made me the peer of Kings and Emperors. My favorites among the moderns were the most elegant and refined of the Italians. Pontanus, Cortesius, and the rest whom I have just named, as well as Nizolius and Naugerius, I ever cherished in my bosom and embrace.¹⁰

As for those who wished to diminish Cicero's supremacy in the slightest, he continues—Politian, Erasmus, Budaeus, and the rest—he scorned them with a terrible scorn. In short, he concludes,

I so religiously venerated Marcus Tully as the god of Latinity that if anyone ever deserved to be flogged on this account—as Jerome says he was—that was I. I preferred to be elected to the company of the Ciceronians rather than to that of the saints.¹¹

We need not take too literally Harvey's account of his excessive zeal. There is doubtless some truth in the tale. Harvey is speaking here of his first years as an undergraduate, and we recognize the man by his enthusiasm. There is, moreover, abundant evidence in this oration that Harvey had played the sedulous ape to Cicero to some purpose. But Harvey enjoys the story of his own extravagance so much that we need not feel embarrassed for him. The upshot is what matters: he at length recovered from this distemper of Ciceronianism—and he wants his undergraduate hearers to profit from the example (One recognizes the time-honored professorial device). At length he realized what in truth he had been doing in his attempts to imitate the smallest nuances of Cicero's style: he was passing by the substantial, nourishing food of eloquence for the condiments, the feast itself for the trappings. In his preoccupation with words, he was letting the substance go, and there was no profit in his finicking learning.¹²

It was his reading that at length recalled him from his folly. He happened upon the rather pedestrian Ciceronianus of Joannis Sambucus; but this work referred him to the Ciceronianus of Peter Ramus; and there, for the first time, he found the nourishing doctrine he had been in need of without knowing it. That Harvey is here recalling his actual experience seems very likely. In his copy of Ramus's Ciceronianus, still preserved in Worcester College, Oxford, Harvey has written: “I redd ouer this Ciceronianus twise in twoo dayes, being then Sophister in Christes College.”¹³ Harvey's devotion to the doctrines and authority of Ramus may be dated from his second or third year as an undergraduate, in 1568-69.¹⁴

From Ramus Harvey learned how to see the virtues of other Latin writers besides Cicero, and the defects of Cicero himself; he learned that Cicero is indeed the best of all and most worthy of being studied and imitated, “sed neque solum, neque totum, neque semper.” Ramus showed him how the ancients have shaped the tradition of the liberal and humane arts: that he who wishes to cultivate these arts must learn from the whole extent of ancient tradition the methods of sound learning and eloquence. Ramus taught him to think of a “Ciceronian” not as one who tries to ape Cicero's style but as one who emulates Cicero's wide-ranging learning, his ability to think clearly and cogently upon the matter before him, and to clothe his thoughts in the most suitable and impressive tropes and figures.¹⁵

This teaching led Harvey to re-read Erasmus with a new understanding and appreciation of him as an interpreter and exponent of ancient wisdom and eloquence; and his tribute to Erasmus is extended to include Sturm. In keeping with this new attitude, he tells his students, he has now come to look upon Italian fashions in rhetoric with distaste; and his highest hopes are centered upon what the rising genius of England may bring forth, if it is properly guided in the paths indicated by Ramus, Erasmus, and Sturm.¹⁶

This bold new hope, then, must have a bold method and program for achievement. And it is Harvey's distinguished office, despite his feelings of modesty, to point the way.¹⁷ He desires his students first of all to put behind them the bulk of the apparatus by which rhetoric has formerly been taught. They are to disregard the endless topics or places of invention multiplied out of Aristotle by his disciples, and they are to substitute the simple scheme and method of Ramus's logic. They are to scorn the phrase-books of the ultra-Ciceronians, and the collections of commonplaces, apophthegms, and other such apparatus of sloth or pedantry popular in the schools. They may neglect the great host of the Ciceronian commentators, for they shall have no need of their ministrations—after listing fourteen of them, Harvey adds facetiously that he pauses only because breath fails him to name the legion of their successors. They are even to distrust the doctrine of that pedagogical treatise received most recently with acclaim in England, the Scholemaster of Roger Ascham.¹⁸ Harvey's exclusion of this last item is very curious, since Ascham was one of Cambridge's most distinguished sons and must have had many friends and admirers at Cambridge in Harvey's day.

Harvey's objection against the Scholemaster is that it is neither fish nor flesh. It trespasses upon the domain of three separate matters: grammar, logic, and rhetoric; yet it is unsystematic and unsatisfactory in its treatment of all three. For his part, Harvey says,

I would transmit grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric with distinctions, divisions, delimitations, giving each subject its due in geometrical proportion, as they say. I should, in short, observe the Aristotelian ‘category-in-itself’—which Ascham has not done. Had he done so, he would not digress so far beyond his circumscribed limits nor turn aside from his purpose with so many an excursus.¹⁹

The basis of Harvey's judgment is clear. As one who had committed himself wholeheartedly to the Ramist method in logic, Harvey was bound to set great store by its cardinal procedures. The method of Ramus depends for its efficacy upon taking care that the distinguished classes of concepts or disciplines be sufficiently comprehensive and mutually exclusive; otherwise, only confusion can result. Such confusion resulting from careless and overlapping classification is precisely the fault Harvey charges against Ascham's treatise. Thus he seems to be judging Ascham's work by criteria Ascham never intended to observe; for Ascham repeatedly says, in the Scholemaster, that he regards his treatise as concerned essentially with grammar. According to Ramist criteria, however, Harvey's objections may be sustained. Such “confusion” was the favorite objection lodged by Ramists against the older methods in logic and rhetoric such as Ascham's Scholemaster exemplifies. The singling out of Ascham's treatise for such criticism was a very bold stroke, and probably indiscreet; for it must have earned Harvey the resentment of men at Cambridge to whom Ascham's memory was still dear. It shows the lengths Harvey was prepared to go in his advocacy of the Ramist methods; for he had no interest in disparaging Ascham on other grounds, and indeed he mentions Ascham repeatedly with the highest respect in other passages in his writings.

But Harvey had resolved to be bold, in any case, to break sharply with most of the popular doctrines in the teaching of rhetoric, and to advocate a program of Ramist methods and studies for the whole of the trivium. The last section of his oration is devoted to a recommendation of this program in the form of a review of the methods used in teaching the imitation of Cicero then prevailing in Europe.²⁰

There are four schools of Ciceronian studies, Harvey says, at present flourishing in Europe. First there are those who emphasize the doctrines of dialectic and rhetoric as taught by Aristotle, Hermogenes, and other Greek authorities, and use these doctrines as their principal guide in studying Cicero. The leaders of this group are Sturmius, Erythraeus, and Toxites. The second group consists of those who take simply the writings of Cicero and Quintilian as their guides, and regard nothing else; among whom the leaders are Omphalius, Latomus, and Caelius Secundus. The third are “those who embrace rhetoric and dialectic from the commentaries of the Greeks and Romans as collected and arranged in perfect order and with refined judgment by A. Talaeus and P. Ramus”—among whom, in addition to the founders of this method, he names J. T. Freigius and Henricus Schorus. Finally, there are those who do not follow any system of rhetorical studies but devote their attention to providing commentaries upon obscure matters of thought, custom, and institutions in the writings of Cicero and other ancients—among whom the most distinguished names are those of P. Manutius and A. Turnebus. For the rest of the commentators, Harvey says, “excepting Pedianus, the oldest of them all, I count them unworthy of sharing the same library, and therefore do not assign them to any group.”

All the four groups enumerated, Harvey considers, have rendered distinguished service to the cause of true Ciceronianism. But among these, the third or Ramist group, he believes, have achieved most. They alone have provided a system of thinking and exegesis, a method of clear and cogent speaking and writing, which may be entirely depended upon in the pursuit of the Ciceronian excellence. They approach most nearly to the perfection he has endeavored to adumbrate in the present oration, and, he significantly adds, “I myself owe most to them.”

The student's procedure in his endeavor to become a worthy follower of Cicero should then be clear. First and last he will have before him the writings of the master. He will at need consult the commentaries of the four groups Harvey has enumerated; but chiefly he will study the logic of Ramus and Talaeus's Rhetoric, and, for the most part, these are the only directives he will need. They are, moreover, splendidly concise and simple to master, a welcome delivery from the labyrinthine tomes of the Aristotelians. With their help, success is practically assured.

The peroration contains a vision or prophesy of the heights of eloquence and learning yet to be achieved by Englishmen, if they have but the will and follow such a prescription as Harvey has advised.²¹ The very youth before him, he says, may yet produce another Cicero, or one even greater! Cambridge University may yet become the center of learning and eloquence, not merely for England but for the whole civilized world! With these prospects, he exhorts his youthful hearers to their most gallant efforts in the rhetorical studies they are about to enter upon. Tomorrow they will have the privilege of hearing Cicero himself.

3

The Rhetor is an even more ardently Ramist treatise than the Ciceronianus—or perhaps one should say “Talaeist,” since its principal purpose is to recommend the Rhetoric of Audomarus Talaeus. The framework of the two orations which compose the Rhetor is a discourse on the three familiar concepts that constitute excellence in any art: Natura, Ars, Exercitatio. The first oration treats of “nature” and “art,” and the second oration of “practice.”

Harvey opens the first oration with amusingly ironic remarks addressed to that part of his undergraduate audience who, as he thinks, are attending as idle onlookers (spectatores), whom he contrasts with the serious students (auditores) who have come with a real desire to hear what he has to say and to profit from his advice.²² He is astounded, he says, at the thronging audience he sees before him, especially since much more distinguished lecturers like Byng and Dodington, he is ashamed to admit, have been forced on more than one occasion to address the walls and empty benches.

A little further on, Harvey intimates that he is addressing an audience of almost 400—an interesting indication of the numbers that might attend an undergraduate lecture at Cambridge in his day, and of his popularity as a lecturer, if we may take his word for the figure. His somewhat invidious comparison of the popularity of his own lectures with those of his elder colleagues is doubtless another example of that lack of tact which earned Harvey so much dislike at Cambridge.

He might have explained the large attendance, he continues, were this his first year as a lecturer; for Cambridge undergraduates are incurable lovers of novelty. Last year he did expect such a throng, nor was he deceived in his expectations. “But this year Harvey is old, nay, ancient: he relinquishes novelty to the new professors.” And he proceeds ironically to urge the part of his audience who consider themselves superior to the old truths of rhetoric and the familiar paths of eloquence to betake themselves elsewhere, to Lngolius or Osorius or some other finicking Ciceronian who suits them better, for they will hear nothing in the manner of such rhetorical exquisites from him.

Turning now to the serious part of his audience—and it is interesting to notice Harvey's affectionate benevolence toward these suavissimi Adolescentes atque bellissimi pueri, youngsters from twelve to sixteen, for the most part, who, nevertheless, he assumes, are perfectly at home in Latin, closely familiar with the great Latin writers of antiquity and with most of the Renaissance Latinists as well—he assures them that he will try to speak with the utmost simplicity and clarity, for he shuns the affectation of learned obscurity and desires to be understood by all. “If you heed my advice,” he tells them, “and not mine merely but that of the best taught and most gifted of men, you will enter in short space the kingdom of Eloquence and confront its beauty. For I think I have, by my years of study, found my way thither; nor do I fear that stale quip: Qui sibi semitam non sapit, monstrat aliis viam.

The three requirements for eloquence, he continues, are native endowment, the rules of art, and practice.²³ For the first, he has only to look about him to see that his auditors are wonderfully provided with it; and he proceeds to develop the theme Naturam non pati senium, to the same effect as in the peroration of the Ciceronianus: they can become Demosthenes or Ciceros if they choose, if they but use the powers God has given them and follow Harvey's teaching.

As for the rules of art, they too are surprisingly simple to master:

I have no use for an art complicated by infinite difficulties, befouled by useless precepts, ill-formed from alien and extraneous matters or contaminated by any other filth; nor with an art devised according to my own whims, or botched together out of miscellaneous sources and elements (too many teachers of rhetoric have given us ‘arts’ of this kind, if one can call them ‘arts’ that display no artistic principles). The Art I want is brief, well-articulated, appropriate, clear, simple, and yet adorned with exquisite definitions, accurate divisions, and striking examples drawn from the most eloquent speakers and the finest orations. …²⁴

in short, it is the Rhetoricae libri duo of Audomarus Talaeus which he thus recommends to them with all the powers of hyperbole and emphasis he commands.²⁵ They are to study it night and day, he says, until they have it by heart. If they do this, they can dispense with their Mosellanus and Susenbrotus, for Talaeus is far superior. They can dispense with the great majority of other rhetorical commentators, save a very few—Cicero and Quintilian, of course, the rhetorical commentaries of Ramus, and the fourth book of Vives' De causis corruptarum artium. These are all they need bother about, if they are guided by “that golden little rhetoric” of Talaeus. They will leave all matters of inventing and judging, to be sure, to the province of dialectic over which Ramus presides, for these are not matters that properly fall within the domain of rhetoric at all.

In the oration of the second day, on Practice, Harvey immediately introduces an allegorical figure, Exercitatio—to whom most of the second oration is given—since he is better qualified, Harvey thinks, to recommend this most important of the three concepts than Harvey himself, and can do so with more warmth and authority. Exercitatio is quite an engaging figure, a little reminiscent of Chaucer's didactic Eagle, with a grave sense of his own importance and a didactic vein fully as earnest and ponderous. Harvey evidently enjoyed using the device a good deal.

Exercitatio comes to warn the undergraduates that they are approaching the very portals of the Court of his mistress, Eloquentia.²⁶ Two instruments, he tells them, are still necessary to them before they can enter the presence of the Queen: Analysis and Genesis, the complementary procedures of the Ramistic “method.” These he alone can supply; and he proceeds to describe, extol, and urge upon them the two operations of analytical study of one's rhetorical models and imitation in one's own writing based upon this analysis, in accordance with the Ramist prescriptions.

In the course of this exhortation, the speaker draws an invidious comparison between the simplicity of Talaeus's treatment of tropes and figures and the stultifying complexity of other treatments; above all, he urges,

do not fall into the Scythian swamp of Hermogenes, that endless and pretentiously vain art, concerning which it is recorded that Hermogenes was so elaborately ingenious he prided himself on being able to include countless figures and other rhetorical subtleties in one and the same period. In which vain labor no few men of our time toil—men in other respects not to be despised, though unfortunately there are increasing numbers of them, especially of those whom your teacher Harvey is wont to call Philogrecians and pseudo-Strassburgers, and whom I would term pseudo-Hermogenes, alias sophists, pseudo-rhetoricians or even rhetorical chameleons: they are not so much nourished with food as saturated with wind and rhetorical hot-air. In truth, through their subtleties, they make themselves more and more obscure until they gradually disappear in mere inanity: they have no worse enemies than themselves.²⁷

Nevertheless, after this thrust at the devotees of Hermogenes, Exercitatio highly commends Sturm's system of practising his students in delivering Cicero's orations as if they were in Cicero's place before a Roman court.²⁸ And he recommends for models, besides the orations of Cicero, the declamations of Seneca the Elder and Quintilian; Demosthenes, Aeschines, and Lucian among the Greeks; and among the moderns, examples from Lorenzo Valla and Ramus, and even a letter of Petrarch.²⁹ Harvey's taste in Latin was catholic enough. With a formal presentation of the Queen of Eloquence, into whose presence the audience is now deemed ready to enter, Exercitatio finishes his discourse.³⁰

Harvey adds a few last words of exhortation and advice. The students are to treasure the wisdom they have just listened to. They are to study the writers previously named, and a liberal list besides (how Harvey loved lists of names!); and he even contrives a complimentary mention of “those wonders of Italy: Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Sannazaro, Ariosto”; and, among English writers, “Chaucer, More, Elyot, Ascham, and Jewel, those gems of our nation.”³¹ With a last puff for the Ramists, and a promise that he will begin the analysis of Cicero's Oratio post reditum ad Quirites the next day, Harvey concludes the oration.

4

In Harvey's day, Cicero was still recognized by English writers as the supreme model of eloquence. The most interesting question for the English teacher of rhetoric like Harvey, as for generations of continental teachers before him, was how to imitate Cicero's eloquence most successfully. But the recipes of the leading exponents of eloquence in Europe differed widely, as Harvey himself observes; and these differences seemed important to Harvey and his contemporaries.

The generation of English teachers before Harvey had been most significantly influenced in their pedagogy by Erasmus—who was not hostile to Cicero but only to the Italian idolatry of him—and by John Sturm of Strassburg. Professor T. W. Baldwin's great study of Shakspere's schooling has shown how Erasmus, and, to a lesser extent, Sturm, had molded English education in the years before Harvey began his teaching career. Everyone knows of Ascham's regard for Sturm and Sturm's educational methods in teaching the imitation of Cicero; and through Ascham, and others, these methods had become influential at Cambridge. William Lewin, to whom Harvey dedicated the Ciceronianus and who seems most likely to have been Harvey's Cambridge tutor, proclaims himself most emphatically of the school of Sturm and Ascham in his letter included in the Ciceronianus.

The great authorities in dialectic and rhetoric for Sturm and his followers were Cicero, Aristotle, and Hermogenes;³² and we may be sure that Harvey himself had been liberally instructed in the Sturmian educational discipline both in his schooldays and under the tutelage of such teachers as Lewin at Cambridge. Sturm and his followers, though not entirely unsympathetic toward Ramus and his educational reforms, were reserved and lukewarm. They did not relish his distinctly qualified regard for the authority of Cicero and Aristotle.

But early in his career at Cambridge Harvey came under the spell of Ramus; and it is clear that as a teacher Harvey devoted his chief energies to popularizing the Ramist methods, in the teaching of rhetoric especially, but apparently, insofar as his influence extended, in other branches of learning as well. He seems to assume that the works of Ramus and the issues raised by the pedagogical innovations of Ramus are fairly familiar even to his undergraduate audience; so that he may not have been Ramus's earliest influential advocate among English teachers, by any means. The correspondence of Roger Ascham, indeed, indicates that Englishmen from Cambridge were seeking out Ramus at Paris before 1552.³³ But Harvey is the earliest English advocate of Ramus I can identify; and it is plain that it took more than a fair share of initiative to be a Ramist advocate in England when Harvey delivered the Ciceronianus and Rhetor. Despite the hostility of conservative colleagues—which we can see reflected in the correspondence of the Letter-Book—despite the resistance of mere inertia which always opposes the proponent of a new method, Harvey became an ardent advocate of the Ramist reforms in the methods of teaching the fundamental disciplines of liberal education in his day—rhetoric and dialectic—reforms that were still being looked upon with distrust and bitter antagonism even among Protestants on the continent, to say nothing of conservative Englishmen brought up on the inviolable authority of Cicero and Aristotle as interpreted in the popular textbooks of the time.

We can see Harvey's pedagogical problem reflected in the Ciceronianus and Rhetor. He was really an innovator in educational methods at Cambridge, a pioneer of the Ramist reforms—though he disguises the fact as best he can from his undergraduates by attacking the Italian refinements of the ultra-Ciceronians, a clever diversion, because attacks upon things Italianate were relatively safe. His real purpose was to recommend the system of Ramus, not merely as an alternative to that of the Italian Ciceronians but as an alternative to the methods of the followers of Sturm as well. This latter required very delicate handling indeed. He did not want to belittle Sturm, or to reflect adversely upon his pedagogy. Sturm's authority was too highly revered for that; and Harvey himself owed much to Sturm. But one could snipe at Sturm's followers, the precious devotees of Hermogenes, the pseudo-Strassburgers, as Harvey calls them, whose doctrine and practice in English education most clearly stood in the way of Ramist reform. One could even disparage the Scholemaster of Roger Ascham, if one had the daring—and Harvey never lacked that.

But the capital trick of all was to present the system of Ramus and Talaeus as if it were in the soundest of ancient tradition, a remarkable simplification of what Cicero and Aristotle had really meant to teach. This is the main emphasis in Harvey's presentation of the Ramist system, the point he dwells upon and returns to in his orations again and again. To follow Ramus and Talaeus is really to follow Cicero and all the best of ancient literature besides; if you have Ramus and Talaeus to guide you in your study of the ancients, you need little else.

This is Harvey's message to his undergraduates; and in due time the message came home. Whatever were the obscure beginnings of Ramist influence in England, Harvey seems to be the key figure among those of whom we have any record. Until the prior claims of some other teacher are established, he may be regarded as the first promoter of the Ramist vogue at Cambridge, where the Ramist doctrines subsequently became the foundation of undergraduate studies, and from Cambridge travelled to the New World.

Notes

1. The full title of this work is Gabrielis Harveii Rhetor, Vel duorum dierum Oratio, De Natura, Arte, & Exercitatione Rhetorica.

2. See the colophons of the two published orations. A bibliographical description of these works occurs in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow (London, 1910), 5. 163-4.

3. An edition of Harvey's complete works is much needed. His Latin writings, a knowledge of which is indispensable to a just estimate of Harvey and his influence, are not generally available. Many of his most interesting marginalia, and the notes on rhetoric in his Letter-Book, have never been published. The inclusion of his two orations on the study of Greek, recently identified by Professor T. W. Baldwin in his Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (1944), 1. 436-7, would add to our knowledge of the state of Greek studies in Elizabethan England. Grosart's edition of the English works [The Works of Gabriel Harvey, D.C.L., ed. A. B. Grosart, London, 1884-5] is biased and inadequate, as everyone knows. An edition of Harvey's complete works would, I think, produce a revision of the common impression of Harvey as a stupid pedant and would greatly increase our understanding of the literary milien in the age of Queen Elizabeth.

4. Documents relating to the University and Colleges of Cambridge (London, 1852), 1. 458-9. For further discussion of the conditions relating to the delivery of Harvey's lectures at Cambridge, see the present writer's introduction to the Ciceronianus.

5. See the discussion of this point in the introduction to the Ciceronianus.

6. Sig. a. ij. All references to the texts of the Ciceronianus and Rhetor in this paper are drawn from photostatic reproductions of the copies in the Henry E. Huntington Library granted through the courtesy of the Huntington Library authorities. The present writer is responsible for the translations given from the Rhetor. He is indebted to Professor Clarence A. Forbes of the University of Nebraska for those from the Ciceronianus.

7. Harvey of course wished to give the impression of casualness about his publications. His apologies for hasty composition, here and elsewhere, are probably parodied in Pedantius, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Louvain, 1905), 1. 2368. For Harvey's subsequent ruses in publication, see especially Josephine Waters Bennett, “Spenser and Gabriel Harvey's Letter-Book,” MP, 29 (1931), 163-36.

8. A. ff.

9. Works, ed. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath (London, 1876-83), 3. 283-4.

10. C. i^v.—C. ij^v.

11. C. ij^v.—D. ij^v.

12. D. iij. ff.

13. G. C. Moore Smith in MLR, 28 (1933), 79.

14. For discussion of the Ramist system in education, see Charles Waddington, Ramus (Paris, 1855); F. P. Graves, Peter Ramus (New York, 1912); Perry Miller, The New England Mind (New York, 1939); and the present writer's introduction to Harvey's Ciceronianus.

15. D. iv. ff.

16. F. ff.

17. F. iv. ff.

18. G. iv.—H.

19. G. iv.^v—H.

20. H. i.^v ff.

21. H. iv.^v ff.

22. A. ff.

23. B. ij. ff.

24. D. iv.

25. E. ff.

26. I. ij.^v ff.

27. M. iij.^v—M. iv.

28. O. iij. ff.

29. O. iij.^v ff.

30. P. iij.^v.

31. Q.

32. See Charles Schmidt, La vie et les travaux de Jean Sturm (Strasbourg, 1855), pp. 233 ff.

33. Ascham, Works, ed. Giles, 1² (1865), 319.