SOURCE: Wilson, Harold S. Introduction to Gabriel Harvey's Ciceronianus, translated by Clarence A. Forbes, pp. 1-34. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska, 1945.

[In the following essay, Wilson examines Harvey's Ciceronianus, describing its composition, context, contents, purpose, and style.]

I

Though Gabriel Harvey was not, like the poet,

A creature quite too bright and good
To be so much misunderstood,(1)

posterity has, on the whole, dealt rather harshly with him. An unwilling participant in a spectacular and amusing but highly undignified flyting with the brilliant Elizabethan journalist, Thomas Nashe, Harvey has commonly been judged from the estimate of his opponent as a dull pedant. But Tom Nashe is a biased witness and quite unfit to judge of Harvey's accomplishments in the learned world of his day. While he was still in his middle twenties,² Harvey distinguished himself at Cambridge as a teacher and one of the University's most accomplished Latinists. He was warmly praised and encouraged by older scholars like William Lewin and Bartholomew Clerke; he inspired the devoted friendship of Edmund Spenser; and he enjoyed the patronage, at one time or another, of statesmen of the eminence of Sir Thomas Smith, Sir Walter Mildmay, Lord Burghley, and the Earl of Leicester. The man whose character and talents were thus admired and commended became one of the most learned scholars of his age and exerted a significant influence upon English letters. But Harvey's claims to serious attention from students of English literature have been too easily disregarded; for these claims are displayed at their best not in the informal pamphlets of his controversy with Nashe but in his less known scholarly writings, which we should also consult for a complete and judicious estimate of the man.

The Latin orations which Harvey delivered as lectures in his capacity of Praelector or Professor of Rhetoric at Cambridge University in 1575-76 and published in 1577 under the titles of Ciceronianus and Rhetor are among the most interesting literary documents of the time. They provide not merely a much needed commentary upon Harvey's own character, literary accomplishments, and influence, but one of the best illustrations remaining to us of Elizabethan learned interests and what passed for Latin eloquence among university men at the time when writers like Spenser and Shakspere were finishing their formal education. The extent to which the Latin studies pursued in the schools and universities influenced and formed educated Englishmen of the Renaissance is yet to be fully demonstrated.³ Many of the tools which every English writer of the age of Elizabeth knew and used from his youth up, in getting his literary education—the Latin logics and rhetorics, the phrase books, the pedagogical works of great educators like Sturm and Ramus, as well as such representative accounts as occur in Harvey's rhetoric lectures of the teaching methods and practices that flourished at the universities—are not yet easily available to students of the period. These means were often decisive in shaping the aims and methods of Elizabethan literature. Toward a better understanding of these means, the present edition of Gabriel Harvey's Ciceronianus is especially designed to contribute.⁴

II

Harvey's appointment as University Praelector in Rhetoric at Cambridge on April 23, 1574,⁵ marked the most important honor Harvey had yet attained in his academic career. He had been appointed to a fellowship at Pembroke Hall in 1570; and although his residence there had been disturbed by academic enmities and intrigue, particularly when he wished to proceed to the M.A. degree, the influence of the Master, Dr. John Young, defeated the resolve of Harvey's enemies among his colleagues to deny his grace for the M.A., and in the autumn of 1573 Harvey became college lecturer on Greek in Pembroke Hall.⁶ Two of Harvey's Greek lectures, recently identified by Professor T. W. Baldwin in an appendix to the 1581 edition of Crispinus's Lexicon Graecolatinum,⁷ indicate that Harvey continued to lecture on Greek in Pembroke Hall even after his appointment to the University Praelectorship in Rhetoric.⁸ With these two posts and his tutorial work besides, Harvey led a very busy academic life indeed between the spring of 1574 and the time of his retirement from his praelectorship in rhetoric more than two years later.⁹

The university praelectorships, though not highly remunerative, were coveted posts among the fellows of the various colleges, to judge by the evidence preserved in Harvey's Letter-Book concerning Harvey's competition with John Duffield for the rhetoric lectureship.¹⁰ Appointments to teaching positions, apart from Regius professorships and other endowed chairs, seem to have been for short terms, it being supposed that incumbents of such lectureships as that in rhetoric would proceed in due time to advanced degrees and other university or professional employments, or to such concentration upon their advanced studies as would preclude their continuing as lecturers. William Lewin, in his prefatory letter to the Ciceronianus, observes that the conditions of appointment and tenure for praelectors were far from satisfactory in Harvey's day. The charges are very familiar: appointments were made on grounds other than academic attainment; the stipends were inadequate; the insecurity of tenure did not encourage the best efforts of teachers.¹¹ Harvey undoubtedly suffered some of these disabilities. It would be interesting to learn the circumstances of Harvey's relinquishing his praelectorship; but I have not been able to discover anything concerning this.

The duty of the Praelector in Rhetoric was to lecture, at least four days in the week during term-time, before the first-year students of the university—for whom rhetoric was the study prescribed by statute—and any other members of the university who wished to attend.¹² University lectures in Harvey's day were apparently no more popular among the undergraduates than they have been reported to be in more recent times. J. B. Mullinger records repeated complaints during the sixteenth century that lectures went unattended, including Harvey's own statement that opens the Rhetor.¹³ Nevertheless, Harvey's own lectures, he lets us know, were extremely well received, attended by thronging audiences of “almost four hundred,”¹⁴ who, on occasion, encouraged the lecturer with whistles and shouts.¹⁵ The lecturer on rhetoric was required to expound “Quintilian, Hermogenes, or some of the oratorical works of Cicero,” and to deliver his commentary in English if his audience were not equal to receiving it in Latin.¹⁶ Whether Harvey was ever reduced to using English in his lectures we do not know; but the Ciceronianus gives every evidence of having been delivered as well as published in Latin.

The Ciceronianus is an inaugural oration, designed to introduce a series of lectures concerned with the analysis of rhetorical models which the students were expected to imitate and emulate in their own rhetorical exercises.¹⁷ Harvey indicates at the end of the Ciceronianus that he proposed to begin such an analysis of Cicero's oration Post Reditum in Senatu the next day. The Rhetor, delivered a year before the Ciceronianus, introduces a similar analysis of Cicero's Oratio post Reditum ad Quirites (sig. Q.ij^v).

The evidence concerning the dates on which Harvey delivered the Rhetor and Ciceronianus as lectures has never been fully considered. Professor G. C. Moore Smith surmised that the Ciceronianus was delivered “in January, 1575, when the University re-assembled after being dissolved for a term on account of plague.”¹⁸ Certain evidence in the Ciceronianus, however, indicates that this dating is inaccurate, while the full evidence offered by the Ciceronianus and Rhetor enables us to date the oral delivery of both works quite definitely.¹⁹

The two orations which compose the Rhetor and which were delivered on successive days were given in the spring of 1575. This appears from the opening of the first oration, where Harvey comments ironically on the large audience that has turned out for his lecture.²⁰ He could explain so large an attendance, he says, were this his first year as a lecturer, for Cambridge undergraduates are notorious lovers of novelty. Last year he did expect such a throng, nor was his expectation mistaken. But this year, “Harueius iam vetus, & prope etiam, quod ille addit, vietus est: nouitatem nouis relinquit professoribus.”²¹

Since Harvey was appointed to his praelectorship on April 23, 1574, this introduction implies that the Rhetor lectures were delivered in the spring of 1575. The date of 1575 is confirmed by a reference that occurs in the second oration of the Rhetor to Petrarch's letter addressed to Cicero that begins, “Epistolas tuas diu multumque perquisitas, atque ubi minime rebar inventas, avidissime perlegi,” and is dated “XVI Kalendas Quintiles, anno ab ortu Dei illius quem tu non noveras MCCCXLV.”²² Harvey's reference, contained in a recommendation of Petrarch's letter as a model, is as follows:

Ex quibus etiam nominatim epistolam vobis peringeniosam, elegantemque commendo Francisci Petrarchae, hominis diuino cerebro, & sua quadam in scribendo singulari quasi vena pollentis; ad Ciceronem illam quidem, sed contra Ciceronem ante annos CCXXX. scriptam, nondum tamen, vt opinor, missam, scriptam autem, cum in eius Epistolas, diu, multumque perquisitas, atque tandem inuentas, incidisset.²³

A reference near the beginning of the first oration to “his presentibus comitijs”²⁴ indicates that both orations were delivered, as Professor Moore Smith supposed, at the Bachelors' Commencement which took place in March²⁵—since the beginning of such a series of lectures as the Rhetor introduces would hardly occur at the only other Commencement, in Mid-summer.

The main clue for dating the delivery of the Ciceronianus is supplied by the jocose digression Harvey introduces in this oration at the expense of one of his colleagues, Harvey's reply to the insinuation of a “nouus philosophus” delivered in a dialogue “the day before yesterday”:

Tantum abest, id vt agnoscam, quod nouus philosophus, familiaris meus, in Dialogo, nudiustertius somniavit, minime mirum esse, si Philosophiae Duffildus valedixerit, cum Harueius suam, quam vnice amaret, & a qua vnice amaretur, quamque supra omnem mundum, non modo supra modum efferret (his mihi verbis philosophus gratificari voluit) eloquentiam deseruerit.²⁶

The allusion to Duffield's bidding farewell to philosophy is explained by an entry in Grace Book Δ for the year 1576:

Conceditur 4 Maii [1576] vt magister Jones fungatur vice magistri Duffyld in philosophica prelectione qui cum necessariis negociis sit impeditus adesse presenti termino non possit.²⁷

Since Harvey's allusion to Duffield and the “nouus philosophus” Jones is clearly a joke intended for Harvey's Cambridge audience, it seems unlikely that it was added to the oration after its oral delivery. If we accept the obvious inference that the Duffield-Jones allusion was part of the oration as Harvey delivered it before his undergraduate hearers, we must place the delivery of the oration not earlier than May, 1576, and in all probability near the beginning of the Easter term, since the Ciceronianus was an inaugural oration.²⁸

We still have to account for Harvey's reference at the beginning of the Ciceronianus to his absence from his Cambridge classes for something under twenty weeks. If this interval occurred in the time prior to May, 1576, as I think it did, I regret that I cannot find a full explanation. The following details, however, are suggestive of an explanation. In the sixteenth century, the menace of the plague was perennial, and Grace Book Δ has repeated references to adjournments and partial adjournments of the University because of it. Particularly common was the adjournment of public meetings, which would include lectures attended by men from the various colleges—like Harvey's lectures to the first-year students in rhetoric—while instruction was continued within the various colleges. Such a partial adjournment is recorded from December 2, 1575 until January 13, 1576:

Conceditur 2° Decembris quum celum sit valde intemperatum et pestis violentia in dies magis et magis crescat vt terminus hodie dissolvatur vsque ad 13 diem Januarii Ita tamen vt singula collegia domi consuetas exercitaciones observent vsque ad finem termini et disputaciones interim fiende in philosophia pro habitis censeantur ad magistros qui interea temporis disputarent sic vt bedellis solvant consuetam pencionem.²⁹

During the Lent term of 1576 there is no record of any adjournment of the University because of the plague; but if the plague had been ‘violent’ in the preceding term, it is extremely likely that it continued menacing when university lectures should have resumed on January 13, 1576—as happened in Lent term of 1575, and again at the same period in 1578.³⁰ It is quite conceivable, therefore, that such university classes as Harvey's should have met irregularly, or even that they should have been dismissed without the dismissal being formally entered in the university records during this term.³¹ Harvey may have found it possible to retire to Saffron Walden, which was but a short distance from the University, because his classes in rhetoric were not meeting; and this adjournment of his rhetoric lectures could have been prolonged to something under twenty weeks, even though Harvey himself were residing in his own college during part of this time.³²

A further possibility is that Harvey really did plan to abandon his rhetoric praelectorship in 1575 or early in 1576, as his “friend,” the “nouus philosophus” Jones, supposed. Perhaps his appointment was not renewed at the beginning of 1576, or perhaps it was proposed that Harvey should deliver lectures on some other subject either to university classes or within his own college. Harvey says that he was preparing a commentary upon Macrobius's Saturnalia the week before he returned to Cambridge to deliver the Ciceronianus (text, p. 56), and it is not likely that such a commentary would have any relation to lectures upon rhetoric. We may suppose that word suddenly reached Harvey at Saffron Walden, the week before classes were to resume for the Easter term, that he had been chosen to deliver the rhetoric lectures for the new term, after all. This would explain his telling William Lewin, in the dedicatory epistle, that the Ciceronianus was the work of “about five days.” We can hardly suppose that this statement applies to the oration as he published it in 1577; but he may have worked it up in its first form during the last week before the Easter term began. The “nouus philosophus,” then, not having heard of the recent change of plan, would be quite innocent in supposing that Harvey intended to abandon his rhetoric lectures.

From Harvey's account of his studious leisure at Saffron Walden during the interval while his lectures were “interrupted,”³³ it seems unlikely that his absence from Cambridge was occasioned by some business unconnected with his university work:

… in otiolo illo Tusculano, & solitario paene plus, quam in Academiae ipsius spatijs, & hac circumstantium frequentissima celebritate consecutum me putem … in otio ita me fuisse negotiosum, vt in maximis, turbulentissimisque negotijs, quibus eram non ita pridem implicatus, magis mihi ipse viderer quadam ratione otiosus.³⁴

The contrast is between the quiet but strenuous activity of uninterrupted study in the country, and the bustling but less fruitful exertions of life at the University while classes were in session. If Harvey had been absent from his classes for nearly twenty weeks because he had had to undertake some business, public or private, he would hardly have used a contrast of this particular sort.

It is clearly indicated, I believe, that the two orations composing the Rhetor were delivered in some form during the spring of 1575, and the first version of the Ciceronianus near the beginning of Easter term, 1576. Thus we may surmise, if we please, that while young Francis Bacon, who was at Cambridge between 1573 and 1575, might conceivably have heard the first version of the Rhetor, he could not have listened to the Ciceronianus delivered the year after he left Cambridge; that Edmund Spenser, whose grace for the M.A. was granted as late as June 26, 1576, might have attended the delivery of both the Rhetor and Ciceronianus as a privileged senior member of the University and a friend of the lecturer; and that Abraham Fraunce, who entered Cambridge in Easter term, 1576,³⁵ would, in the normal course of events, be among the freshman hearers of the Ciceronianus and would receive from Harvey, if he had not already been indoctrinated, the gospel according to Ramus and Talaeus which it was Harvey's chief purpose to preach and which Fraunce later turned to use in his Lawiers Logike and Arcadian Rhetorike.

It is almost equally certain that these orations were carefully revised and enlarged before they were sent to the printer in 1577. The evidence of revision is clear in the Rhetor, where two books are mentioned which did not appear in print until the year after the oral delivery of the lectures in 1575.³⁶ The evidence of revision in the Ciceronianus is not so clear. None of the books mentioned in this oration was published later than 1575, as far as I know;³⁷ and I have not observed any other conclusive evidence of revision. Nevertheless, it seems exceedingly likely that the Ciceronianus, like the Rhetor, was carefully revised before publication. The Ciceronianus in its published form is far longer than any university lecture should be.³⁸ But the decisive consideration is that Harvey's interest would lead him to take every possible care with both the Ciceronianus and the Rhetor before he sent them to the printer, in order to make the best possible impression with their publication. When we consider that from one to two-and-one-half years elapsed between the delivery of these lectures and their publication; that these works are lengthy, carefully polished pieces of Latinity; and that Harvey himself on subsequent occasions resorted to elaborate plans and stratagems for impressing the public in print;³⁹ we cannot take Harvey literally when he tells William Lewin, in the dedication of the Ciceronianus, that it is a hasty composition, “qualem ego dierum fere quinque spacio effingere potui.”⁴⁰ Both the Ciceronianus and the Rhetor are, beyond doubt, the fruit of painstaking composition and revision.

The Ciceronianus was entered in the Stationers' Register, March 20, 1577, and published by Henry Bynneman, the well-known London printer,⁴¹ in June of the same year. Harvey dedicated his treatise to William Lewin, then Judge of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, but formerly a fellow of Harvey's college, Christ's, while Harvey was an undergraduate, and Public Orator at Cambridge in 1570-71, a man of high repute both in the academic world and in public life. The dedication was gracefully apologetic, in the customary manner; and the circumstance that Lewin rather than Harvey sent the manuscript to the press was not, one suspects, on Harvey's side merely fortuitous.

Though the practice of publishing scholarly orations and lectures was common enough on the continent, it was not yet so in England. Laurence Humphrey, as President of Magdalen College and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, had published his orations delivered before Queen Elizabeth, and there had been a few others; but English college lecturers had not yet begun to take the initiative in publishing their own discourses. When Walter Haddon's orations and other works appeared in 1567, they were collected and edited by Thomas Hatcher, and both the title-page and preface implied that this publication was without Haddon's collaboration and was rather due to the desire of Hatcher to make such valuable work available than to any desire or suggestion of Haddon.

In 1577 Gabriel Harvey was obscure or unknown to the reading public and still a new man at Cambridge, working to establish his academic reputation. He would wish to avoid the imputation of thrusting himself before the public in a kind of publication that had little or no precedent in England. Furthermore, Harvey always conceived of himself as the man of action quite as much as the scholar. In this role, it was fitting that he should treat his publications in something of an offhand manner; it would look well if he himself should seem too much engaged in other affairs to be able to see his own work through the press. It would look extremely well if he could manage to suggest that the very publication was somehow solicited, or at least encouraged, by a man of Lewin's standing and integrity. By the device of sending his manuscript to Lewin, who, as his warm friend and well-wisher could be depended upon to welcome Harvey's project of publication and perhaps to have some influence with the printer Bynneman as well,⁴² Harvey was able to convey this suggestion. Once the favorable reception of the Ciceronianus was secured, the way would be made easy for the subsequent publication of the Rhetor. We need not suppose that Lewin was a deliberate collaborator in Harvey's little stratagem. Lewin doubtless understood the purposes Harvey had in mind in using him as his agent with the printer; but it was a mild and comparatively innocent stratagem; the oration itself was good and deserving of publication; Harvey was a promising young man and Lewin's friend, and the dedication itself was something of an honor. A man of Lewin's urbane and generous spirit would easily accept the role Harvey, who was not utterly lacking in adroitness, so disarmingly thrust upon him.

The sub-title of Harvey's oration⁴³ is designed to suggest Cicero's Oratio post Reditum in Senatu habita as the text of the ensuing lectures which the Ciceronianus introduces, as well as to anticipate the analogy of Harvey's return from Saffron Walden which Harvey develops in his introduction and conclusion. As the title-page further indicates, Harvey's published treatise is designed especially for the benefit of his former undergraduate hearers.⁴⁴ Since Harvey had retired from his praelectorship in rhetoric some time before the publication of the Ciceronianus, he cannot be suspected of requiring his students to buy his textbook. The practice, as far as I know, had not become a scandal in the sixteenth century.

The Ciceronianus exists today in at least eleven copies, five of which are not listed in the Short-Title Catalogue.⁴⁵ Harvey apparently contemplated bringing out a second edition,⁴⁶ but there is no record that such an edition ever appeared.

III

Harvey's Ciceronianus deals with a topic of perennial concern among the learned throughout the Renaissance: the broad question of what constitutes the best Latin style and how one may attain it. Despite the growth of the vernacular literatures throughout Europe during this period, Latin remained the common language of the educated; and almost all literary training, in England as on the continent, was conducted in Latin and was concerned simply with Latin, and, occasionally, a little Greek. The schoolboys and university students of Elizabethan England learned to write through practicing Latin composition in prose and verse. The course of literary studies followed in the grammar schools, so admirably demonstrated by Professor Baldwin, culminated in the practice of the Latin oration, and this practice continued in the study of rhetoric at the universities. In this form, Cicero was acknowledged by almost universal consent to be the greatest master. Everybody agreed that the best way to learn to write was by studying and imitating the best model or models. The great issues for teachers of rhetoric throughout the Renaissance were: whether or not Cicero should be the only model or norm for Latin prose eloquence, and how one could best imitate the model or models chosen. Harvey's Ciceronianus is one of a long line of Renaissance treatises (often bearing the same title) that attempt to answer these questions; and the English representative is very far from being the dullest or the least distinguished of the line.⁴⁷

Harvey's Ciceronianus belongs to the class of oratory called deliberative, designed for giving counsel and naturally adapted to the purposes of the college lecturer. It is constructed according to the conventional divisions of introduction, narration or statement of the facts of the case, proposition, digression, confirmation, refutation, and conclusion; and doubtless it was intended as a kind of model for the undergraduates' emulation.

Harvey opens his discourse in accordance with the Aristotelian principle that in deliberative speeches one may well begin with a reference to oneself,⁴⁸ a beginning designed to produce the effect of urbane informality recommended by Quintilian.⁴⁹ The panegyric upon Cicero that follows the exordium (pp. 46 ff.) is, I think, to be regarded as a narratio.⁵⁰ It sets forth the fact Harvey and his audience are agreed upon: that Cicero is the greatest of orators. Here the art of amplification, the jewelled favorite—or, if one prefers, the bedizened strumpet—of the Renaissance rhetorical ménage, was expected to appear and dazzle all beholders; and Harvey, despite his modest disclaimers, levies upon the best resources of his rhetorical narthecium, to use one of his own favorite tropes. The aim, in this extravagant passage, was not, of course, to offer a judicious critical estimate of Cicero but to regale the audience with an example of rhetorical virtuosity. The fun consisted in repeating in as many ingeniously different ways as one could what both Harvey and his audience regarded as a commonplace, the superlativeness of Cicero's eloquence; and the stronger the exaggeration in such an amplification, the better. Whether Harvey carries his amplifications too far, here and elsewhere in the oration—as he himself seems to doubt in one self-conscious aside (p. 48)—is a matter of taste. They were intended to seem spirited and entertaining, without unduly retarding the conduct of the argument.

The propositio is: “vt nec alios non aliquando legamus, in suo genere excellentes: & ad Ciceronem semper, tanquam ad Eloquentiae maximum natu filium, atque adeo haeredem recurramus” (p. 56). Following this, Harvey introduces his first digression (p. 58), the jocular reply to the “nouus philosophus” who had indiscreetly insinuated that Harvey might abandon his praelectorship in rhetoric. Whether the “nouus philosophus” Jones was a friend or an enemy of Harvey, we cannot tell. Probably his remark was quite innocent and intended merely as a piece of enlivening local color in the philosopher's lecture, with regard for the same rhetorical injunction Harvey exemplifies in his reply, that the orator should lighten his discourse with jests and humorous passages. Harvey's banter about prophetical powers seems a little heavy-handed; and certainly his patronizing tone is not very kind. But the Elizabethans were rough jesters, and the joke may have been intended in good enough part. One imagines that it raised a laugh.

Harvey begins his confirmatio (pp. 58 ff.) with the account of his early affectations as an Italianate Ciceronian, an account intended as an object-lesson for his undergraduate hearers. He proceeds to explain and defend the tradition of Ciceronianism he now adheres to, which he recommends to his audience, the trans-Alpine tradition of Erasmus, Ramus, Sturm, and Freigius (pp. 68 ff.). The refutatio (pp. 86 ff.) contains Harvey's satirical picture of the superficial and foolish expositors of Cicero's eloquence among the teachers of his day, an account that complements the earlier humorous confession of his own rhetorical follies and thus deprives his satire of undue invidiousness. This passage is followed by a survey of the different schools of Ciceronian exegesis then flourishing in Europe that Harvey approves, and some indications of Harvey's own method of teaching Cicero (pp. 94 ff.). The peroratio (pp. 98 ff.) contains Harvey's graceful apology for his own temerity in undertaking to expound the Ciceronian eloquence, and a stirring prophecy of the heights of eloquence yet to be attained by English genius at Cambridge.

IV

That Harvey was not deficient in a sense of humor is surely evident from the opening part of his proof, in which he describes his early devotion to Cicero and his painful attempts to imitate him. The autobiographical form of this passage is in the best tradition of academic oratory. Joachimus Fortius Ringelbergius, in his De ratione studii (1529), which G. C. Moore Smith describes as “the gospel of Harvey's youth,”⁵¹ introduces a charming account of his experience as a student;⁵² and Harvey's favorite, Ramus, enlivens his commentaries occasionally with an autobiographical reminiscence.⁵³ The most remarkable parallel for Harvey's use of autobiographical matter, however, occurs in the fifteenth oration of the first volume of Muret's Orationes,⁵⁴ entitled “De toto studiorum suorum cursu deque eloquentia ac ceteris disciplinis cum Iurisprudentia coniungendis,” delivered at Rome in 1567. Muret describes how, during his earlier education, though he had acquired the taste for the study of law, his preparation had been inadequate and none of his teachers had been competent to advise him properly. He was thus drifting along, comfortable enough in his ignorance, when God brought it about, as he insists, that he encountered the writings of Budaeus and Alciatus. These authorities were a revelation to him of his ignorance. It was like coming out of the mists and the shadows into the light of day. They taught him what he should know and set him on the right path to that knowledge of the law which he had long desired but hitherto had striven for in vain.⁵⁵ The parallel with Harvey's “discovery” of Ramus and subsequently of the “true” Ciceronians⁵⁶ is striking. But I can find no evidence that Harvey knew or used this oration of Muret; and from Harvey's assumption that Muret is to be classed with the Italian Ciceronians,⁵⁷ it seems unlikely that Harvey, at least when he wrote the Ciceronianus, was familiar with the group of Muret's orations that reflect his growing anti-Ciceronian bias,⁵⁸ to which the oration containing the passage here described belongs.

Harvey's account of his extreme Ciceronian period is obviously modelled upon Erasmus's portrait of the Ciceronian Nosoponus in his famous dialogue. Harvey uses a good many of Erasmus's points and occasionally echoes his phrasing;⁵⁹ but Harvey's account is a spirited adaptation of Erasmus's satirical sketch,⁶⁰ in no sense a plagiarism. The deliberate and skilful imitation of Erasmus would of course be noticed and relished by Harvey's audience.

How much of Harvey's story of his Italianate Ciceronianism is true would be hard to guess. Harvey is clearly trying to outdo Erasmus in his picture of Ciceronian affectation, and some part of his account is probably fictitious. There are abundant indications, however, in Harvey's Latin style that he had played the sedulous ape to Cicero, and Harvey uses some of the very words and phrases that Erasmus—and Harvey himself—cite as ultra-Ciceronian affectations. Whatever part of Harvey's account is true, he is recalling his first years as an undergraduate; for we learn from his note in his own copy of Ramus's Ciceronianus: “I redd ouer this Ciceronianus twise in twoo dayes, being then Sophister in Christes College.”⁶¹ Harvey's “conversion” by Ramus, as he describes it (this text, pp. 70 ff.) must therefore have occurred during his second or third year at Cambridge, probably in 1569.⁶² One can imagine that a youth of Harvey's quickness and enthusiasm, with a touch of solemn naïveté, might have been capable of some such extravagance as Harvey describes. But we need not take the account too seriously. Whatever folly Harvey may have perpetrated in his determination to out-Cicero Cicero, it was a mere youthful enthusiasm from which he quickly recovered; and he can make exquisite fun of it from the vantage-point of his maturity.

The next section of Harvey's argument contains his notion of true Ciceronianism, a conception he owes, in various parts, to Erasmus, Ramus, and Sturm, as he himself scrupulously acknowledges.⁶³ The idea of learning how to imitate Cicero from observing Cicero's own character as a man and orator, his own practice in imitation, and the spirit of his eloquence as it is reflected in the writings not merely of Cicero but of other good classical Latin authors, was really expressed or implied in Erasmus's Ciceronianus⁶⁴ before it was set forth as the central thought in Ramus's work of the same name, though Ramus characteristically is unaware of any indebtedness to Erasmus, or is unwilling to acknowledge it. It is a little odd, though perhaps understandable in the light of Harvey's enthusiasm for Ramus and sense of indebtedness to him, that Harvey should regard this view as Ramus's great discovery, when it had been commonplace ever since the appearance of Erasmus's brilliant dialogue, if not before. Ramus is Harvey's chief hero; and for reasons presently to be discussed, Harvey is more interested in claiming discipleship to Ramus than in his debt to Erasmus; though his tribute to the latter is graceful enough, and very proper, since Erasmus was the decisive influence in English education during Harvey's youth,⁶⁵ and Harvey probably owed more to Erasmus than he fully realized.

The beginnings of the influence of Peter Ramus in England are obscure. The educational reforms of the famous King's Professor of Philosophy and Eloquence at the University of Paris, particularly in the methods of teaching dialectic and rhetoric, spread to all parts of Europe during the latter half of the sixteenth century and constituted one of the chief Protestant weapons of attack against the scholastic Aristotelianism still largely fostered by the Church of Rome.⁶⁶ In England, the Ramist reforms were welcomed chiefly at Cambridge, where the Ramist methods in dialectic and rhetoric eventually became the foundation of undergraduate studies, while Oxford preferred to maintain its conservative devotion to the older Aristotelian tradition. What seems to be the earliest English reference to Ramus occurs in the correspondence of Roger Ascham, who speaks rather slightingly of Ramus in a letter to John Sturm dated April 4, 1550.⁶⁷ In a subsequent letter,⁶⁸ Ascham makes some amends for his earlier hostile allusion to Ramus, but his tone suggests that he did not intend to exert his influence in England on behalf of Ramus's reforms.⁶⁹ In the same letter, however, Ascham mentions “certain Englishmen from Cambridge,” intimates of Ramus who have visited him in Paris.⁷⁰ Through their agency, doubtless, Ramus's doctrines first gained a footing in England. There are various other clues. The high opinion Ramus held of Sir Thomas Smith during the latter's ambassadorship at Paris, as reported by Harvey,⁷¹ suggests that Smith in turn may have encouraged Ramist studies in England, and perhaps he may even have recommended Ramus to his protégé, Harvey. There can be little doubt that Sir Philip Sidney's interest in Ramism⁷² was fostered during his continental travels and particularly through his friendship with Languet.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Harvey should have been devouring Ramus eagerly, as an undergraduate, by 1569. Harvey became an ardent disciple of Ramus and soon made his discipleship known, as we learn from the correspondence concerning the denial of Harvey's grace for the M.A. in his Letter-Book. Harvey was charged by his enemies with supporting certain paradoxes and “straung opinions” in philosophy against the authority of Aristotle.⁷³ As Harvey explains, he prefers the views of Ramus and others, in some matters, to those of Aristotle, whose authority he does not so blindly reverence that he “can strait wai take it for scripture what soever he hath givn his wurd for.”⁷⁴ In the same year (1573), Harvey thus enthusiastically recommends Ramus to the undergraduates of Pembroke Hall, in his first lecture as Greek Reader: “Ramus, non ille quidem Ramus, sed arbor, vt ita dicam, cunctarum Artium, non modo vtriusque Grammaticae, florentissima.”⁷⁵ In 1574, the Makylmenaeus translation of Ramus's most influential work, his treatise on dialectic, was issued at London. And in this year, Harvey began spreading the gospel according to Ramus and Talaeus with his rhetoric lectures at Cambridge.⁷⁶

In the Ciceronianus, it is evident that Ramus is Harvey's chief master. Harvey gives Ramus credit for the principle of literary imitation he seeks to inculcate,⁷⁷ and it appears from the latter part of Harvey's oration that in his lectures Harvey's commentary upon his rhetorical text followed the Ramist method of analysis.⁷⁸ Harvey's panegyric upon Ramus in the Ciceronianus,⁷⁹ however extreme it may appear to present day taste, was in keeping with Harvey's confession at the end of the Ciceronianus that Ramus and Talaeus were the teachers to whom he owed most.⁸⁰

The doctrines of Ramus were still new enough in England when Harvey undertook to champion them that Ramist discipleship must have seemed attractively daring to one of Harvey's energetic and enthusiastic temperament. Ramus was a Protestant hero, peculiarly sympathetic to the strain of Protestantism that flourished at Cambridge; and Harvey may have shrewdly calculated the eventual triumph of Ramist methods there. Certainly he contributed his share to that triumph. But most of all Ramus seems to have appealed to him as providing a sensible and humane simplification of the older Aristotelian methods of teaching logic and rhetoric to youth, who in Harvey's time did not receive their education in predigested form nor from very gentle hands. It was not without reason that Harvey gave Ramus the chief place in his pedagogical pantheon.

Harvey's following tribute to John Sturm, the great Strassburg educator,⁸¹ is, however, no less significant of a shaping influence in Harvey's rhetorical background. In his mention of Sturm, Harvey gives the impression that, before he happened upon Sturm's edition of Cicero's orations, he had been but slightly acquainted with Sturm's writings.⁸² As Professor Baldwin has shown, however, Sturm's textbooks and his educational ideas were widely influential in the English grammar schools during the time Harvey was a schoolboy;⁸³ and Harvey probably experienced this influence in no slight degree, whether he fully realized it or not. Sturm's influence had been especially fostered at Cambridge by men like Ascham and Lewin. The latter, whose example and guidance at Cambridge Harvey warmly acknowledges and who seems most likely to have been Harvey's Cambridge tutor,⁸⁴ was Sturm's particular friend, confidant, and representative in England after Ascham died.⁸⁵ Lewin's devotion to Sturm is interestingly reflected in his prefatory letter to the Ciceronianus. One suspects that Lewin's remarks concerning his preference for Sturm above Harvey's favorite Ramus⁸⁶ were prompted by Lewin's feeling that Harvey had not done full justice in the Ciceronianus to Sturm's merits and prestige. Altogether, it looks as if Sturm may have figured more importantly in Harvey's rhetorical education than Harvey is inclined to admit.

It is clear that, at the time he delivered the Ciceronianus, Harvey had a considerable knowledge of Sturm's works. Beyond the writings referred to in the Ciceronianus,⁸⁷ Harvey shows his familiarity with Sturm's De exercitationibus rhetoricis, liber academicus (1575) in the Rhetor, which contains an extended quotation from this work of Sturm concerning Sturm's method of having his pupils deliver Cicero's orations as if they were in Cicero's place before a Roman court, a practice Harvey heartily commends.⁸⁸ It seems most likely, furthermore, that Harvey's acquaintance with Sturm's writings did not stop here.⁸⁹

Harvey had been educated in a rhetorical tradition strongly influenced by Sturmian texts and pedagogical methods; and in Harvey's time as a teacher of rhetoric at Cambridge, Sturm's reputation was very great and his influence most actively felt in English education. But Sturm was, on the whole, a Ciceronian of the Italianate variety who believed that the exact and exclusive imitation of Cicero, especially of the formal characteristics of his style, was the proper aim of one who would write Latin.⁹⁰ Sturm emphasized the importance of keeping Ciceronian phrase-books and commonplace books with the aim of cataloguing all the elements of Cicero's style.⁹¹ If one studied other writers, he said, it was only for the purpose of making Cicero's excellences appear more clearly: one formed one's style according to Cicero in the same way that one formed one's soul according to the Evangelist.⁹²

Most of this doctrine Harvey had come to reject; indeed, much of the Ciceronianus is simply an account of why and how he had come to reject it in favor of the teaching of Ramus. But Harvey still honored Sturm for some of his teaching; and he was doubtless indebted to the Sturmian influence for many of the elements in his own stylistic practice, which suggests some recourse to commonplace books and flores elegantiae for its Ciceronian elegances, despite Harvey's belittling of such means to his undergraduates. Harvey wished to minimize the influence of Sturm at Cambridge, and in the place of Sturm to exalt Ramus. Harvey's disparagement of Italianate fashions in rhetoric is indirectly a disparagement of the aims and methods of the Sturmians in England—for the authority of Italians like Cortesius and Bembo had scarcely figured in English education, and Italian fashions were not generally favored in England by Harvey's time. The Italian Ciceronians, however, made good whipping boys; by attacking them, Harvey could advance the Ramist methods without offending such Sturmians as his friend Lewin.

Harvey's criticism of the Scholemaster of Sturm's most famous English disciple, Roger Ascham, however, is something less than tactful and very significant of Harvey's attitude. The passage is partly apologetic and is apparently intended to mitigate Harvey's preceding satiric reference to some of the terminology in Ascham's treatise.⁹³ But the criticism of Ascham's pedagogical method is none the less definitely severe, and serves to emphasize one of the cardinal tenets of the Ramist system: that the disciplines of the trivium must be kept distinct. Harvey had no motive, apart from his Ramist sympathies, for disparaging Ascham. On the contrary, he revered Ascham's memory and habitually praises him as among the intellectual leaders of England, elsewhere in his writings.⁹⁴ The criticism of the Scholemaster shows very clearly Harvey's purpose of minimizing the Sturmian influence in English education, the influence so patently reflected in Ascham's treatise.

V

Cicero was still the great exemplar and pattern of eloquence for Harvey, as he had been for Ascham's generation in England. The point of view which occasioned this exaltation of Cicero was European rather than specifically English and part of the Renaissance Weltanschauung.⁹⁵ In the Renaissance view, all human knowledge had formal limits conformable to the rational order of things appointed by God in the universe and discoverable by human reason. These formal limits distinguished the various arts of men, which men had found out through the ages by the exercise of God-given natural reason. It was generally thought that in literary art the ancients, preeminently endowed with natural reason, long ago had discovered the fundamental principles of eloquence, and that the most eloquent orator of antiquity, Cicero, had best exemplified them. The right training in literary art required the imitation of the best—since the best was already known, and since it was absurd to suppose that any untutored modern could discover the best independently, simply through his own efforts and experiments. Thus Harvey enjoined the imitation of Cicero upon his students as sincerely and as ardently as had any of his predecessors.

But the imitation of Cicero had its weaknesses and its abuses, as it was inculcated by the pedagogues. The tendency to imitate the merely formal characteristics of Cicero's style, to neglect thoughtful matter in favor of commonplaces, formulas, showy tropes and schemes culled from one's reading, and phrases patched together in a mosaic compiled out of the current “aids to writers,” was all too common.⁹⁶ English writers as diverse as Sir Philip Sidney⁹⁷ and Ralph Lever⁹⁸ censured such practices before Harvey, but the practices nevertheless continued. The complaint was summed up in the well-known words of Francis Bacon:

… these four causes concurring, the admiration of ancient authors, the hate of the schoolmen, the exact study of languages, and the efficacy of preaching, did bring in an affectionate study of eloquence and copie of speech, which then began to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than matter; and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment. Then grew the flowing and watery vein of Osorius, the Portugal bishop, to be in price. Then did Sturmius spend such infinite and curious pains upon Cicero the orator and Hermogenes the rhetorician, besides his own books of periods and imitation and the like. Then did Car of Cambridge, and Ascham, with their lectures and writings almost deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and allure all young men that were studious unto that delicate and polished kind of learning.⁹⁹

Harvey wished to oppose the excessive preoccupation with words at the expense of matter not by diminishing the prestige of Cicero's example but by reinterpreting its significance. He found the cue for his main argument in Ramus's Ciceronianus. If Cicero is the best of orators, we should remember that the imitation of Cicero means the imitation of the best, which is exemplified not merely in Cicero's practice but in the practice of all other ancient writers who share with Cicero the best qualities of eloquence.¹⁰⁰ It is hard to understand how this transparent petitio could have satisfied men as acute as Ramus and Harvey; but it is typical of the sort of argument advanced concerning the choice of one model or many, in the Renaissance disputes about imitation. What chiefly mattered to the disputants was gaining the victory. Whether you favored eclectic imitation or imitation of the single example of Cicero, the way to advance your cause was to pile up as many arguments, good or bad, as you could think of; or else to enforce your argument with high-sounding authority and rhetorical copiousness, as Harvey does, and thus overwhelm your opponents with the eloquence of your reasoning, rather than with reasoning.

Having thus dispensed with the idea of Cicero's unique prestige as a model for eloquence, Harvey could the more easily discourage the meticulous aping of Cicero's style with the help of phrase-books and formulas that his students had so laboriously practiced in grammar school. The scorn he heaps upon the painful pedagogues with their haec insignis repetitio est,¹⁰¹ upon the Ciceronian phrase-books and their makers, must have been richly enjoyed by the brighter, at least, of his undergraduate hearers. Harvey greatly admired the figure of irony;¹⁰² in his comments upon the rhetorical stupidities and affectations of his day, he enjoyed a fine scope for an ironic talent he has not always been given sufficient credit for.

Under the guise of criticizing the Italianate Ciceronians, Harvey covertly attacks most of the pedagogical fashions observed in English schools by the followers of Sturm. Sturm's favorite authorities, besides Cicero, were Aristotle and Hermogenes. Harvey's references to Aristotle in the Ciceronianus are quite respectful,¹⁰³ and his antipathy toward Hermogenes, whose authority was very highly esteemed in England,¹⁰⁴ appears only in a passing reference to the affected use of Greek rhetorical terminology;¹⁰⁵ but the Rhetor contains a magnificent blast directed at the devotees of Hermogenes and calculated to demolish them in a single salvo.¹⁰⁶

All of this destructive criticism is designed in support of Harvey's positive program for rhetorical studies which he drew chiefly from Ramus. The generation of Thomas Wilson and Roger Ascham had accepted the authority of Aristotle and Cicero without any particular critical reserve and without feeling the need of radical change in the traditional methods of teaching these authorities. During their lifetime, Peter Ramus was vigorously campaigning at Paris to reorganize and simplify the traditional methods of teaching dialectic and rhetoric; but Thomas Wilson seems quite unaware of Ramus and his reforms, in his treatises on logic and rhetoric; and Ascham treats Ramus and Talaeus lightly, almost disdainfully, in his correspondence and in the Scholemaster.¹⁰⁷ Between the generation of Wilson and Ascham on the one hand, and of Harvey on the other, Ramus had made an impression upon European education. In Protestant circles, especially, his Dialecticae Libri Duo and the Rhetoric of his collaborator Talaeus had gained wide publicity through controversy, and ardent champions; and Ramus had won still greater Protestant sympathy through his martyrdom in the St. Bartholomew massacre. Ramus and Talaeus had achieved a real, if narrow simplification over the older methods of teaching dialectic and rhetoric; and their reforms, so convenient in lightening the teacher's task if they were granted to be sound, were sure to make headway sooner or later in Protestant England. Harvey was one of the first to accept the advantages claimed for the Ramist methods, to teach and extoll them with all the disciple's ardor.

The course Harvey proposed to follow in his lectures was to observe Ramus's division of dialectic from rhetoric, and to provide a separate commentary upon matters of dialectic and of rhetoric, using Ramus's method of logical analysis and Talaeus's method of dealing with tropes and schemes.¹⁰⁸ He made some commentary upon every point in the text he was lecturing upon for which he thought his undergraduates needed any explanation; and he wished to give the impression that he followed all the respected authorities in rhetoric of his day, in the attempt to make his commentary exhaustive.¹⁰⁹ But Ramus and Talaeus were his principal guides.

During the Renaissance, one lectured upon the orations of Cicero, or whatever other text might be chosen, with the purpose of explaining how one might imitate the text—or the principles of eloquence it illustrated—in one's own writing. Harvey's aim and procedure in lecturing upon rhetoric is summed up by what the Ramists called “Method.”¹¹⁰ This method, as it applied in teaching an oration of Cicero, consisted of two operations: “Analysis” of the logical and rhetorical elements in the oration; and “Genesis,” by which one imitated the “art” of one's model in the light of the preceding analysis.¹¹¹ Harvey exemplified the Ramist “analysis” of Cicero's eloquence, for the benefit of his undergraduates, in his lectures;¹¹² they were supposed to practice this same analysis in their study of Cicero, and to emulate Cicero's example in their own writing through the practice of “genesis.”¹¹³

This Ramist program, however, Harvey is careful to present under the patronage, so to speak, of Cicero. Ramus again provided the cue. If one wishes to imitate Cicero, one should study the causes as well as the effects of his eloquence.¹¹⁴ Did not Cicero himself study dialectic? Did he not concern himself with all the matters explained in the dialectical and rhetorical treatises of Ramus and Talaeus while he was developing his own eloquence? Ramus and Talaeus have given us the simplest and the best treatments of dialectic and rhetoric, and have, moreover, observed the proper boundaries between these two studies.¹¹⁵ Therefore, one gathers, the best way to learn the causes of Cicero's eloquence is to study Ramus and Talaeus.¹¹⁶

Harvey describes this program and recommends it as a brave new prospect calculated to fill his audience with enthusiasm. His concluding prophecy of future English eloquence and the renown yet in store for Cambridge as its foster home, like Ascham's concluding boast in the Scholemaster of the Ciceronian studies then flourishing in England,¹¹⁷ is characteristic of the buoyant spirit in English letters before the turn of the century. Harvey was at the height of his own academic success when he wrote these words, reminiscent of the dreams of greatness scattered through his marginalia, and it seemed as if he were but on the threshold of an important career. No shadow of his later misfortunes touches the Ciceronianus and Rhetor, which are as full of youthful energy and hopefulness as they are of rhetorical artfulness.

VI

That Harvey wrote what his age considered good Ciceronian Latin can hardly be questioned. Nashe refers to him scornfully as “Tullies nexte and immediate successor, vnder Carre”;¹¹⁸ but William Lewin,¹¹⁹ Bartholomew Clerke,¹²⁰ and Thomas Hatcher¹²¹ all speak of Harvey's Latinity with the highest respect—and these men were better judges than Nashe.

To write Latin according to the formula admired in Harvey's day meant that one had constantly to echo Cicero or other classical models. Far from regarding such imitative effects as pedantic or unoriginal, cultivated readers enjoyed the interweaving of classical allusions and reminiscences with the texture of the author's thought—if it were done with some finesse—for the double pleasure of recalling a familiar classical context and admiring the author's learning and skill in making use of it. The writer acquired not merely his vocabulary and syntax, but his figures, set phrases, cadences, and other stylistic apparatus, with the help of phrase-books, to be sure, but also from the minute and laborious study of Cicero and other models. The diction of Cicero, especially, was indelibly impressed upon the memory, whether gently and pleasurably or by force. Harvey had been thoroughly exposed to this training, and he had, from his own account, taken to it with zeal. It is not very remarkable, then, that Ciceronian and other classical parallels are discernible everywhere in the Ciceronianus. Harvey could, when he chose, weave a passage entirely out of classical phrases and echoes, chiefly Ciceronian, as he does in his praise of Ramus.¹²² This was the hall-mark of elegant learning.

But Harvey had come to take pride in a certain independence of the strict Ciceronian canon, by the time he wrote the Rhetor and Ciceronianus, especially in his diction. He enjoys little jokes about such forms as rhetoricantem;¹²³ and in the Rhetor, he deliberately employs the form specierum.¹²⁴ He had learned to set greatest store by sound matter and simple, forceful delivery, though by no means neglecting the smaller refinements of style; and, on occasion, he knows how to “mount as hyghe, as the quality, or quantity of his matter requireth.”¹²⁵

If one wishes to estimate the literary merit of Harvey's Ciceronianus, the fairest comparison is not with Erasmus's treatise of the same name, which is a dialogue, the work of a more versatile Latinist and a greater man. For a strictly fair comparison, one may take the orations contained in the Latin works of Walter Haddon.¹²⁶ Hatcher's edition contains a preface by Thomas Wilson praising the editor for collecting such valuable work, concerning which Wilson concludes, “Nam qui hunc tuum laborem reprehendit, improbus est, qui non agnoscit, ingratus, qui probat, humanus, qui imitatur, vir bonus merito dici potest.”¹²⁷ But if the modern reader hopes to find an engaging literary talent in Haddon that students of English letters have hitherto overlooked, I am afraid he will be disappointed. Haddon's academic orations, which, to be sure, are shorter and less ambitious than Harvey's, are conventional in thought and undistinguished in style. They have none of Harvey's variety, and wit, and animation; and they are innocent of any daring or even very clearly formulated ideas. Some of Haddon's verses are more readable,¹²⁸ and his argument in defence of Elizabeth against Osorius has historical interest; but when he discourses “De laudibus eloquentiae,” or exhorts the young to follow humane learning,¹²⁹ he is tiresome.

Whatever else may be charged against Harvey, he is not dull. His Ciceronianus does not suffer from the professorial deliberateness and diffuseness of Ramus's, which is, moreover, utterly unrelieved by any lightness or humor, though it is, of course, the work of a more independent mind. Harvey is, perhaps, by present standards a little too fond of highly wrought rhetorical effects, as were most of his contemporaries. In his thinking, he is dependent on the authority of greater men, whom he freely and gladly recognizes as his leaders and betters. He is admirably incisive and clear in his doctrine, more independent in his taste than most English teachers of rhetoric in his day; and he is, above all, humanly interesting. It must have been fun to attend his lectures.

VII

Of Harvey's learning, it should be said at once that it is very much greater than that of the present writer, who cannot hope to comment adequately upon it here. The evidence of the present oration is hardly needed to establish the point that Harvey was a very learned man, one of the most learned of his age. From the Ciceronianus we can perceive that by his twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh year Harvey had acquired a thorough knowledge of Cicero's works and probably a close familiarity with most of the other classics of Latin antiquity as well.¹³⁰ It is not so easy to estimate his knowledge of Greek. The Greek scattered through the Ciceronianus does not signify much, since it consists mostly of rhetorical terms or stock phrases and quotations easily available in the quotation books of the time and commonly employed for decorative effect by Renaissance Latin writers. Any informed opinion of Harvey's Greek learning will have to wait upon a systematic examination of his lectures on the study of Greek¹³¹ together with whatever evidence on this matter is available elsewhere in his writings.

What appears most clearly in the Ciceronianus is Harvey's close acquaintance with the Latin learning of his time and especially his active interest in contemporary educational methods. From Petrarch and Lorenzo Valla to Ramus and Sturm, Harvey takes some account of most of the great names in European learning either in the Rhetor or the Ciceronianus;¹³² and his allusions show a more than casual acquaintance with their writings. Anyone who has examined a volume containing Harvey's marginalia knows how painstakingly Harvey studied the authors that interested him. The range and thoroughness of his reading are truly amazing. Yet in the field of rhetoric alone, there are certain authors Harvey studied with care before he published the Rhetor and Ciceronianus who are not mentioned in either of these works.¹³³ Clearly, Harvey was above using his full resources in learning for display. As a careful examination of his pamphlets in the controversy with Nashe will show, Harvey preferred to deprecate and conceal his erudition rather than to parade it. This is not the sign of a pedant.

VIII

The praelectorship in rhetoric provided Harvey's first opportunity to make his mark in the world. Harvey was of humble origin; but he was clever, industrious, and intensely ambitious, and if he established a reputation for learning and eloquence at Cambridge he might hope in due time to succeed to some important place, either in the University or in public life. Men as humble as he had won great power and places before him, and Harvey was ever mindful of their example.¹³⁴ His aim, considering his attainments in learning, was neither unprecedented nor foolish. The winning of distinction in the academic world was one of the most usual preliminaries to advancement in the age of Elizabeth. With the Ciceronianus and Rhetor, Harvey made his first important bid for such advancement.

Apparently, to judge from the commendations of contemporaries,¹³⁵ Harvey's distinction as a scholar was widely recognized. If advancement had depended merely upon such credentials as his published Latin orations, Harvey would probably have gone far. But Harvey suffered certain serious handicaps: a proud and uncompromising spirit; a lack of social ease that made it hard for him to get along with those who considered themselves his superiors by birth and breeding; occasional faults of judgment and taste; and he had the great misfortune to lose the support of the patron most interested in advancing his merit, through the death of Sir Thomas Smith in 1577. All Harvey's dreams of advancement came to nothing. All his prospects of a fine career were blighted before the outbreak of the controversy with Nashe in the 1590's. He was doomed to live out a long life amid petty frustrations and abandoned hopes. He has been most often ignored or casually patronized by later generations. His only editor, the crotchety Grosart, regarded him with active dislike.

Yet apart from the sentimental esteem he has occasionally won as the friend of Spenser, the author of the Rhetor and Ciceronianus has some independent claim to the respect at least of teachers and scholars. Harvey was not, of course, an important writer in the sense that Sidney or Spenser was, and it would be foolish to consider him in that way. He was neither a very good poet nor a particularly independent thinker; and as a controversialist, though he was better, perhaps, than has sometimes been allowed, he often lacked restraint and judgment. But he was a painstaking scholar and spirited teacher, a good representative of the learned interests and activities of his age. His learning was far greater than that of most recent commentators upon him; and yet he had the grace to make his presentation of that learning interesting. That Harvey should still occasionally be labelled “pedant” in the references one encounters to him in our learned journals seems a little hard; as St. Ives remarked to his taciturn Scots guide on another occasion, it sounds a little like Satan reproving sin.

Notes

1. “Horace's Vitas hinnuleo (i. 23), done by Mr. William Wordsworth,” in G. M. Whicher and G. F. Whicher, Roba D'Italia (Amherst, Mass., 1930), pp. 67-8.

2. This assumes that he was born about 1550, as Professor G. C. Moore Smith (Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia [1913], p. 8) has most plausibly argued.

3. Among recent studies directed to this end, see D. C. Allen, Francis Meres's Treatise “Poetrie”: A Critical Edition (1933); W. G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance (1937); Warren Taylor, Tudor Figures of Rhetoric (1937); H. D. Rix, Rhetoric in Spenser's Poetry (1940); John Rainolds, Oratio in Laudem Artis Poeticae, ed. W. Ringler and W. Allen (1940); F. R. Johnson, “Two Renaissance Textbooks of Rhetoric: Aphthonius' Progymnasmata and Rainolde's A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike,” HLQ, VI (1943), 427-44; K. R. Wallace, Francis Bacon on Communication and Rhetoric (1943); T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere's Petty School (1943), and the same author's monumental William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (1944).

4. Unfortunately it has not been possible to include the two lectures that compose the Rhetor in the present edition. The Ciceronianus and Rhetor represent a single point of view and reciprocally illuminate Harvey's rhetorical doctrine and pedagogical methods. A brief comparative analysis of the two works is contained in a paper by the present writer, “Gabriel Harvey's orations on Rhetoric,” ELH, xii (1945), 167-182. In the present edition, the Rhetor is cited at those points where it most significantly illuminates or supplements the doctrine of the Ciceronianus. An edition of the complete works of Gabriel Harvey and his brothers is a desideratum. They were an energetic and colorful family, whose intellectual activity touched the culture of their time at almost all points.

5. Grace Book Δ. Containing the records of the University of Cambridge for the years 1542-1589, ed. John Venn (1910), p. 274; Marg., p. 13. Harvey had already been lecturing in this capacity since the beginning of Lent, 1574, at the request of his predecessor in this office, Robert Church (Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey, A.D. 1737-1580 ed. Edward John Long Scott, London, 1884, p. 176).

6. Letter-Book, pp. 1-54; Marg., pp. 10-13; J. W. Bennett, “Spenser and Gabriel Harvey's Letter-Book,” MP, XXIX (1931), 163-186.

7. Small Latine, I.436-7.

8. G. H. De Discenda Graeca Lingva Oratio Secunda: “Duo sunt fere anni, humanissimi auditores, ex quo vobis adiumentum aliquod ad Graecarum literarum intelligentiam, nobilissimaeque linguae cognitionem attulimus” (Lexicon Graeco-latinum, Nunn. vij^v.).

9. Harvey retired from his praelectorship before February 11, 1577, the date of William Lewin's letter that prefaces the Ciceronianus, in which Harvey's retirement is referred to (text, p. 42). There is no record of the precise date of Harvey's retirement in Grace Book Δ. Harvey began a series of rhetoric lectures for Easter term, 1576 (see below, pp. 7 ff.), so that it is unlikely he retired earlier than Mid-summer of 1576.

10. Letter-Book pp. 171 ff.; and see the note on 58.3.

11. This text, p. 42. Roger Ascham had earlier (1553) advocated some more stable provision for the study of ‘tongues and sciences’ at Cambridge; but the prevailing feeling during the reign of Elizabeth was that most university posts should be regarded as temporary employments auxiliary to the candidate's preparation in divinity, law, or medicine, and his subsequent practice of his profession outside the University. In founding Emmanuel College, Sir Walter Mildmay expressly stipulated that fellowships should not be permanently held: “We would not have any fellow suppose that we have given him, in this college, a perpetual abode” (J. B. Mullinger, The University of Cambridge, II.114-5, 315).

12. The statutes of 1570 for Cambridge University prescribe rhetoric as the study occupying the whole of the undergraduate's first year (Documents relating to the University and Colleges of Cambridge [London, 1852], I.458-9). It is these freshmen (suauissimi Adolescentes atque bellissimi pueri), youngsters from twelve to sixteen, for the most part, whom Harvey particularly addresses in the Ciceronianus. Older students, and colleagues (ornatissimi viri) might be privileged spectators. It was apparently customary among the lecturers to attend at least the inaugural lectures of colleagues; see this text, p. 58, and Rhetor, B.ij.

13. The University of Cambridge from the Royal Injunctions of 1535 to the Accession of Charles the First (Cambridge, 1884), pp. 96-7, 426.

14. Rhetor, C.iij^v.

15. Ibid., A.iv^v.

16. Documents, I.457.

17. The Ciceronianus seems strictly to constitute a resumption or second beginning of a series of lectures earlier commenced and for some reason ‘interrupted’ (this text, p. 84). See the following discussion.

18. Marg., p. 13. In fixing upon this date, Professor Moore Smith was apparently guided by Harvey's opening words in the Ciceronianus: “Redeo tandem ad vos, mei Auditores … non vt Vlisses ille πολύτϱοπος ad suos Ithacenses, a quibus plures annos aberat, quam ego a vobis hebdomades. …” The University records show that, following Harvey's appointment to the praelectorship in rhetoric in April, 1574, the University recessed because of the plague from October 10, 1574 to January 13, 1575 (Grace Book Δ, p. 283). Since this constitutes an interval of more than thirteen weeks, it suggests an explanation of Harvey's allusion to the absence of Ulysses (i.e., he had been absent somewhat under twenty weeks) particularly if we suppose that Harvey may have been including some time previous to the official date of adjournment, that is, prior to October 10, 1574, in his calculations. Furthermore, there is no record of a comparably long recess until we come to October 12, 1577 (Grace Book Δ, pp. 312-13; C. H. Cooper, Annals of Cambridge, II.357), by which date Harvey had relinquished his praelectorship.

19. Professor Moore Smith did not assign a year for the delivery of the Rhetor lectures, but he did indicate the occasion of their delivery, “at the Comitia, the Bachelor's Commencement, in March” (Marg., p. 15).

20. Sig. A. ff.

21. A.ij^v.

22. Fam. XXIV.3; ed. Fracassetti (1859-63), III.262.

23. Sigs. O.iv, O.iv^v.

24. A.ij. Though ‘comitiis’ could be used in the general sense of ‘a gathering or assembly,’ Harvey's context makes it clear enough that he is using the word in the technical sense of ‘Commencement’: “Hoc autem anno, & his presentibus comitijs, tantum aberat … vt ingentem illam, atque grandem multitudinem, celebritatemque Academicam vel sperare possem, vel exspectare auderem …”

25. See Grace Book Δ, p. 313. Since students often matriculated at the beginning of the Easter term (see Alumni Cantab., passim; Easter, 1575, fell on April 3rd) and might be admitted some days or weeks before matriculation, it is easily understandable why Harvey describes some of his audience as former hearers of his lectures and some of them as “new” (sig. B^v).

26. This text, pp. 56, 58.

27. P. 295.

28. If one cares to try to make the date still more specific, there is some slight basis for doing so. Easter Sunday in 1576 fell on April 22nd. Since the Easter term at Cambridge traditionally begins on the Wednesday week after Easter, we may guess that the term began in this year on or about Wednesday, May 2nd. If we suppose further that ‘magister Jones’ as the person chosen to read the philosophy lectures for this term began with the “Dialogue” Harvey refers to then or shortly thereafter, and that it was delivered two days before Harvey's Ciceronianus (“nudiustertius”), we may place the delivery of the Ciceronianus sometime during the week of May 2 to May 9, 1576. But this is a very finical conjecture. Concerning Duffield and Jones, see the notes on 58.3, 58.1.

29. Grace Book Δ, p. 295.

30. Ibid., pp. 283, 312-13.

31. It is noteworthy in this connection that Grace Book Δ contains no dated entries between March 7, 1576 and May 4, 1576.

32. Professor G. C. Moore Smith has recorded Harvey's entry in his copy of Quintilian: “Rhetoricus Professor Cantab. 1573,1574,1575.” The date 1573 is, of course, old style, since we know that Harvey began to lecture, at the earliest, from “y^e beginning of Lent” 1574, to fill out the unexpired term of Robert Church (Letter-Book, p. 176). The date 1575, which may be old style, too, need not be taken as indicating the end of Harvey's praelectorship, however, since it is quite possible that Harvey made this notation in 1575 or early in 1576, before his lectureship expired. He may have thought he had finished his work as a lecturer on rhetoric at this time, only to change his plans later on; see the following discussion.

33. “Interruptam illam quidem, sed non abruptam explicandi Ciceronis exercitationem …” (this text, p. 84).

34. This text, p. 54.

35. He matriculated 26 May, 1576 (A. Fraunce, Victoria ed. G. C. Moore Smith [1906], p. xix), but he probably entered at the beginning of the term, as was customary.

36. Rhetor, E^v. The two books are Petri Rami Veromandui, regii professoris, Dialecticae lib. duo, ex variis ipsius disputationibus, et multis Audomari Talaei commentariis denuo breviter explicati, a Guilielmo Rodingo Hasso. Francofurti, apud Andream Wechelum, 1576, with a preface dated “IIII. Idus Januarii Anni CID. ID. LXXVI,” to which Harvey refers; and P. Rami, professio regia, hoc est septem artes liberales in regia cathedra per ipsum Parisiis apodictico docendi genere propositae & per Ioan. Thomam Freigium in tabulas perpetuas, ceu sτϱώματα quaedam, relatae … Colophon: “Basileae, excudebat Sebastianus Henricpetri, Anno a Christo nato CD. ID. LXXVI. Mense Martio.”

37. Harvey's complimentary reference to the Ciceronianus of J. T. Freigius (this text, p. 78) can be placed near the date of the delivery of Harvey's lecture. Freigius's Ciceronianus appeared in 1575. But Harvey's own copy, preserved in Worcester College Library, Oxford, contains the date, in Harvey's hand, “4 Aprilis 1576” at the end of the volume, which contains copious annotations. Presumably this date indicates when Harvey finished his first reading of the volume, which was probably among the books he studied during his Saffron Walden vacation.

38. My own impression from trying to read the Ciceronianus through orally at a normal speed is that its delivery would require considerably more than two hours. But university lectures in Harvey's day were of one hour's duration (Rhetor, A.iij^v). Compare the much briefer compass of Harvey's two lectures on the study of Greek, the first of which covers three pages and the second six (in small type) at the back of the 1581 edition of Crispinus's Lexicon Graecolatinum; while the Ciceronianus covers 67 pages (in large type) and the two orations of the Rhetor 124 pages. Since the lectures on Greek were published inconspicuously under the author's initials only, Harvey would have the less incentive to expand them in revision.

39. See J. W. Bennett, “Spenser and Gabriel Harvey's Letter-Book,” MP, XXIX (1931), 163-86.

40. This text, p. 36. Harvey of course wished to give the impression of casualness concerning his publications. His apologies for hasty composition, here and elsewhere, are probably parodied in Pedantius, 1.2368. But cf. Harvey, Works, ed. Grosart, I.176: “I stil dwel in the same opinion, that nothing would be committed to a publike view, that is not exactly laboured both for matter and maner …”

41. See Henry R. Plomer, “Henry Bynneman, Printer, 1566-83,” The Library, n.s. IX (July, 1908), 225-44; A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers, ed. R. B. McKerrow (1910).

42. Nashe repeatedly twits Harvey with having to pay for the publishing of all his writings; The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, London, 1910, I.261; III.128.

43. Oratio post reditum, habita Cantabrigiae ad suos Auditores.

44. Quorum potissimum causa, diuulgata est.

45. I am informed by Mr. W. A. Jackson of the Houghton Library at Harvard that there is a second copy of the Ciceronianus in the Bodleian and a copy in the Library of Westminster Abbey, not listed in the STC. In this country, there are copies in the libraries of Yale University and the University of Chicago; in the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Henry E. Huntington Library, and the Newberry Library. J. E. B. Mayor, Scholemaster (1863), pp. 272-73, quotes from an edition of the Ciceronianus then in the library of St. John's College, Cambridge.

46. Marg., pp. 216 ff. Mr. W. A. Jackson has pointed out to me the record in the auction catalogue for November 30, 1922, which shows that the English auctioneers Hodgson & Company on that date sold in lot No. 5 the following: “G. Harvey, Ciceronianus, 1577; Rhetor, 1577; Smithus, 1578; three books bound as one volume.” This sounds as if it might be the volume seen by Thomas Baker, whose notes on it are transcribed by G. C. Moore Smith in the appendix to his edition of Harvey's Marginalia. I have not been able to learn the present whereabouts of the volume sold in 1922. It may have been broken up into three separate volumes after it was purchased.

47. The whole broad subject of Renaissance Ciceronianism has been widely discussed, though it has not been definitively treated by any one writer. Among the most useful discussions are Charles Lenient, De bello Ciceroniano apud recentiores (1855); Remigio Sabbadini, Storia del Ciceronianismo (1885); Izora Scott, Controversies over the Imitation of Cicero during the Renaissance (1910); Herman Gmelin, “Das Prinzip der Imitatio in den romanischen Literaturen der Renaissance,” Romanische Forschungen, XLVI (1932), 83-360.

48. Rhet., iii.14; cf. Quintilian, iii.8.8.

49. iii.8.59.

50. Quintilian (iii.8.10) says that in deliberative oratory when the audience is seeking advice they may be supposed to know the facts of the case and therefore a narratio is not needed. But a passage in praise of Cicero would be expected of one who spoke upon the Ciceronian eloquence at Cambridge in Harvey's day, and the natural place for such a panegyric would be as a narratio following the introduction.

51. Marg., p. 254.

52. Io. Fortii Ringelbergii … de ratione studii … cura Ev. Scheidii (Lugduni Batavorum, 1792), pp. 40 ff.

53. E.g., Scholae in liberales artes (Basileae, 1578), col. 424.

54. M. Antonii Mureti opera omnia, ed. C. H. Frotscher (Lipsiae, 1834-41), I.222-26.

55. Opera, ed. Frotscher, I.222-24.

56. This text, pp. 68 ff.

57. This text, p. 80.

58. See M. W. Croll's discussion of these in PMLA, XXXIX (1924), 279 ff.

59. See the notes on 62.15 ff.

60. Harvey's account consists especially in amplifications of some of Erasmus's points; e.g., he expands the list of favorite Ciceronian words and phrases in Erasmus (Opera, I.986), and develops his joke about the use of capital letters from a mere suggestion in Erasmus (I.987 A).

61. This volume is now in Worcester College Library, Oxford.

62. See the note on 64.10-13.

63. This text, pp. 70 ff. Harvey's inclusion of J. T. Freigius among the exemplars of true Ciceronianism does not indicate a separate influence upon Harvey's doctrine, since Freigius was one of Ramus's most devoted disciples. Harvey read and carefully annotated Freigius's Ciceronianus (1575), probably before he delivered his own lecture (see above, note 37). But Freigius's work is simply a detailed account of how to find the loci communes in Cicero, and for Harvey it probably served chiefly as a reference work and not as an influence modifying in any specific way the literary theory Harvey received directly from Ramus.

64. Cf. Opera (1703-06), I.1002 C ff.: “Quid igitur superest, nisi ut ipsam etiam Ciceronis imitationem ex ipso discamus Cicerone? Sic illum imitemur, quemadmodum ipse est alios imitatus, etc.” I.1026 C: “Admonendi sumus & illud, ut quod in Cicerone praecipuum est imitemur. Id non in verbis, aut orationis superficie, sed in rebus ac sententiis, in ingenio, consilioque situm est.”

65. See T. W. Baldwin, Small Latine, passim.

66. On Ramus's career, writings, and influence, see especially Charles Waddington, Ramus (Paris, 1855); F. P. Graves, Peter Ramus (New York, 1912); Perry Miller, The New England Mind (New York, 1939); R. Tuve, “Imagery and Logic: Ramus and Metaphysical Poetics,” JHI, III (1942), 365-400; E. L. Wiggins, “Logic in the Poetry of John Donne,” SP, XLII (1945), 41-60.

67. Roger Ascham, Works, ed. Giles, I¹, 186. Ascham's references to Ramus have been discussed by M. Guggenheim, “Beiträge zur Biographie des Petrus Ramus,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Philosophische Kritik, Band 121 (Leipzig, 1903), 140-53.

68. Dated Jan. 29, 1552; Giles, I², 318-22.

69. Cf. the invidious allusion to the pedagogical methods of Ramus and Talaeus in the Scholemaster, ed. Mayor (1863), p. 101. There is a friendly letter from Ramus to Ascham dated March 6, 1564 (Giles, II.96-7), but this letter suggests that Ramus and Ascham had nothing more than formal respect for each other.

70. Works, ed. Giles, I², 319.

71. Marg., p. 222.

72. See Abraham Fraunce's prefatory letter to The Lawiers Logike (1588).

73. Letter-Book, ed. E. J. L. Scott (1884), p. 10.

74. Ibid. F. R. Johnson, Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England (1937), pp. 190-95, makes the valuable suggestion that Harvey's interest in the science of his day fostered his regard for Ramus and his independence toward the authority of Aristotle.

75. “G. H. De Discenda Graeca Lingva Oratio Prima,” in Crispinus, Lexicon (1581), Nnnn. vij.

76. E. K., in his commentary upon the Shepheardes Calender, refers to what seems to be a poem in praise of Ramus called Rameidos by Harvey (Variorum Spenser, VII. 93). Harvey expresses a high regard for Ramus's biographer, Banosius (see Works, ed. Grosart, I.xli), and repeatedly for Freigius (cf. Nashe, Works, ed. McKerrow, III.29). Gabriel's brother Richard was apparently an equally enthusiastic Ramist, a point on which Nashe reproaches him (Works, ed. McKerrow, I.196,269). Richard's Ephemeron, sive Paean, in support of Ramus, appeared in 1583.

77. This text, pp. 72 ff.; and see section V, below.

78. This text, pp. 84 ff.; and see section V, below.

79. This text, pp. 72, 74.

80. This text, p. 96. Cf. the comparable praise of Talaeus in the Rhetor, sig. E. ff.

81. On Sturm's career and system of teaching, the best study is Charles Schmidt, La vie et les travaux de Jean Sturm (Strasbourg, 1855); see also E. Laas, Die Pädagogik des J. Sturm (1872); C. Engel, L'Ecole Latine et l'ancienne académie de Strasbourg, 1538-1621 (1900); W. Sohm, Die Schule J. Sturms und die Kirche Strassburgs (1912).

82. This text, pp. 74, 76.

83. Small Latine, passim.

84. William Lewin was fellow of Christ's College, 1562-71. Harvey's reference in his dedicatory letter addressed to Lewin: “Do enim non meum, sed Ciceronis ipsius Ciceronianum, &, quem tu mihi ante octo annos dedisti, Oratorem,” refers to the period 1568-69, when Harvey, as an undergraduate at Christ's, was forming his tastes in rhetoric. Harvey further acknowledges Lewin's guidance of his reading and his recommendation of Sturm's Partitions of Oratory and Dialectic (this text, p. 74).

85. The collection of Zurich Letters, second series, A.D. 1558-1602, ed. H. Robinson (Parker Society Publications, volume 18; Cambridge, 1845) contains two letters from Lewin to Sturm, dated from London, August 25, 1576 (pp. 169-71) and September 8, 1576 (pp. 173-75). From these letters it appears that Lewin's friendship with Sturm was of long standing and very intimate, and that in 1576 Lewin was acting as Sturm's representative in Sturm's dealings with Queen Elizabeth, Burghley, Walsingham, and other influential people in England.

86. This text, p. 38.

87. These include the “paucas epistolas” Harvey refers to, the Partitiones Oratoriae and Partitiones Dialecticae recommended by Lewin, and the edition of Cicero's orations with Sturm's preface (this text, pp. 74, 76).

88. O.iij, O.iij^v.

89. Cf. Harvey's letter to Arthur Capel, Letter-Book, p. 167: “Now, if your leisure wil serv you … to run thurrough ani part of M. Ascham (for I suppose you have canvissid him reasnably wel alreddi), or to hear the report of the furius outragies of Fraunc in Inglish, or to read over the Courtier in Lattin (whitch I would wish, and wil you to do for sundri causis), or to peruse ani pes of Osorius, Sturmius, or Ramus, or to se ani other book, ether Inglish or Lattin, that I have, and mai stand you in stead, do but cum your self, or send on for it, and make your ful account not to fail of it.” Harvey's own survey in the Ciceronianus of the four schools of Ciceronian exegesis flourishing in Europe (this text, p. 94) finds a close parallel in Sturm's threefold classification of ancient rhetorical authorities in his prefatory letter to Valentinus Erythraeus's De ratione legendi, explicandi, et scribendi epistolas, libri 3 (1576), and the form of Harvey's passage is perhaps suggested by Sturm's antecedent example (see the note on 94.3 ff.).

90. See J. Schmidt, Vie de Sturm, p. 278.

91. Ibid., pp. 256-57.

92. Ibid., p. 279.

93. This text, pp. 90, 92, and the notes on 90.8-12, 90.32 ff., 92.7-11.

94. See J. E. B. Mayor's collection of Harvey's tributes to Ascham, a collection which could be enlarged, in the Scholemaster (1863), pp. 272-74.

95. See Hardin Craig, The Enchanted Glass (1936); A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1937); H. S. Wilson, “Some Meanings of ‘Nature’ in Renaissance Literary Theory,” JHI, II (1941), 430-48; E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (1943).

96. See the admirable analysis of this literary method in D. C. Allen, Francis Meres's Treatise “Poetrie” (1933).

97. “So you can speak and write Latin, not barbarously, I never require great study in Ciceronianism, the chief abuse of Oxford, Qui dum verba sectantur, res ipsas negligunt” (Pears, Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, p. 201).

98. “As for Ciceronians and suger tongued fellowes, which labour more for finenes of speach then for knowledge of good matter, they oft speake much to small purpose, and shaking foorth a number of choise words, and picked sentences, they hinder good learning wyth their fond chatte” (The Arte of Reason, rightly termed Witcraft, 1573, sig. **.j^v.).

99. Works, ed. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath (London, 1876-83), III.283-84. It is interesting to speculate whether the judgment here expressed may not have been formed in part, at least, under Harvey's tutelage at Cambridge. Much of what Bacon says is reflected or implied in the Rhetor and Ciceronianus—and during his days at Cambridge Bacon could have heard Harvey lecture on rhetoric.

100. This text, p. 70. Cf. Ramus, Ciceronianus (1557), C ij: “Equidem quod rectae & emendatae loquendi consuetudini congruum & consentaneum vsquam fuerit, id Ciceronianum vel maxime reputo”; C ij^v: “Denique vt de Attico genere Cicero ipse aliquando sentit, sic de Ciceroniano sentiamus: Ciceroniane loqui hic idem esse, quod bene”; D ij: “Hoc certe Ciceronianum est, non ex vno authore aliquo, sed ex omnibus cuiuscunque generis, copiam verborum & bonitatem parare: in optimo tamen & excellentissimo quoque diutissime permanere.”

101. This text, p. 86.

102. See Marg., index, s.v. ‘irony.’

103. He could leave the idolatry of Aristotle's authority to the tender mercies of Ramus, if his undergraduates followed Harvey's advice and read Ramus's treatises on dialectic. Cf. however the charge of Harvey's colleagues in Pembroke Hall that Harvey was lacking in sufficient respect for Aristotle's authority, Letter-Book, p. 10.

104. See the example cited by Hoyt H. Hudson in his edition of John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style (1935), pp. xxiii-iv; and Richard Rainolde, A Booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), a.iij^v. Hermogenes was one of the authors prescribed for study at Cambridge. For the early vogue of Hermogenes in Renaissance rhetoric, see H. S. Wilson, “George of Trebizond and Early Humanist Rhetoric,” SP, XL (1943), 367-79.

105. This text, p. 86.

106. This passage is translated in the present writer's article, “Gabriel Harvey's Orations on Rhetoric,” ELH, xii (1945), 167 ff. For a possible reference to the contemporary fame of this passage, see Nashe, Works, ed. McKerrow, III.91: “… the high straine of his harmonious phrase, wherein he puts downe Hermogenes with his Art of Rhetorique …”

107. See above.

108. This text, pp. 84, 92. Cf. the description of the commentary based upon Talaeus's Rhetoric that Harvey apparently used in his lectures, Rhetor, M.ij^v. ff.

109. This text, pp. 92 ff.

110. Cf. this text, p. 90: “Nam quod ad Methodi splendorem attinet, etc.” See also Perry Miller, New England Mind (1939), pp. 132 ff.

111. See the explanation and praise of these complementary procedures in the Rhetor, sig. L. ff.

112. What Harvey thought of as “genesis” was no doubt exemplified in the literary form of such an oration as the Ciceronianus.

113. The detailed explanation of this procedure is contained in the Rhetor. The Ciceronianus seems to assume that Harvey's present class is already quite well acquainted with ‘glorious Method,’ which Harvey would have exemplified in his earlier lectures on Cicero which were ‘interrupted’ (this text, p. 84).

114. This text, p. 72; Ramus, Ciceronianus (1557), B ij^v.

115. This text, p. 94.

116. In the Rhetor, Harvey tries to show that Cicero really meant to teach dialectic and rhetoric in the Ramist fashion.

117. Ed. Mayor (1863), p. 184.

118. Works, ed. McKerrow, I.290.

119. See his prefatory letter, this text, p. 38.

120. Prefatory letter to the Rhetor, a.iij^v, a.iv.

121. Marg., pp. 216-17.

122. See the notes on 72.31-74.24.

123. This text, p. 58, and the note on 58.21-22.

124. Sig. L.iv. Cf. this text, p. 66. See also Rhetor, sig. B: “Neque enim multos, & multa lectitans, interdum etiam poetas, vt iubet Crassus apud Ciceronem, affirmare audeo me nullum verbum in tam subita oratione ponere non in thesauro Ciceroniano indicatum.”

125. Marg., p. 124.

126. G. Haddoni … lucubrationes passim collectae et editae. Studio et labore Thomae Hatcheri Cantabrigiensis. Londini, apud Gulielmum Seresium. 1567.

127. Sig. ¶ 4.

128. Poemata (1567,1576); see the discussion in Leicester Bradner, Musae Anglicanae (1940), pp. 22-23.

129. Lucub., pp. 1-9, 109-34.

130. The best evidence of Harvey's learning is of course contained in his annotated books.

131. In the first of these lectures Harvey apologizes very frankly and humbly for his temerity in attempting to teach Greek, and offers as his excuse the fact that no one else in Pembroke Hall would undertake the task. He adds that he hopes to learn, along with his students.

132. For Petrarch and Valla, see Rhetor, O.iv.ff. The Rhetor also contains a hint of Harvey's equally keen interest in the vernacular literatures of his day (sig. Q.); but this is a subject better to be discussed in relation to Harvey's own vernacular writings and his marginalia.

133. The most striking illustration of this is provided by folios 54-57 of Harvey's Letter-Book (omitted in the edition of E. J. L. Scott) which Harvey headed “Fine notes for mie Rhetorique Discourses,” and which must have been made before Harvey relinquished his praelectorship. These consist of excerpts from J. L. Strebaeus's De verborum electione et collocatione oratoria, and some other notations. There were numerous editions of this popular work from 1538 on, and I do not know the particular edition Harvey used. I have consulted the edition issued at Basel, 1539. As far as I have observed, there is no clear evidence that Harvey made any use of this work or his notes upon it in either the Rhetor or Ciceronianus. Another favorite educational authority of Harvey's, whom he does not mention in his published orations on rhetoric, is Joachimus Fortius Ringelbergius.

134. See Marg., index, s.v. Wolsey, Cromwell, etc.

135. See the list of those who commended Harvey in Harvey's Works, ed. Grosart, II.83-4. Even Nashe, in the apology to Harvey prefixed to Christs Teares (1593), acknowledged Harvey's ‘aboundant Schollership’ (Works, ed. McKerrow, II.12).