[In the following excerpt, Belloc praises Cranmer's prose, arguing that his genius was not innate but rather the product of deliberate and scholarly effort.]

[The] genius of Cranmer in this supreme art of his—the fashioning of rhythmic English prose—was not of that spontaneous kind which produces great sentences or pages in flashes, as it were, unplanned, surging up of themselves in the midst of lesser matter; he was not among prose writers what such men as Shakespeare or Ronsard are among the poets—voluminous, uneven, and without conscious effort compelled to produce splendours in a process of which they are themselves not aware. He was, on the contrary, a jeweller in prose, a man who sat down deliberately to write in a particular way when there was need or opportunity for it, but who, on general occasions, would write as might any other man. We have a great mass of what he did, in long letters to Boleyn, to the King and to Cromwell, careful arguments transcribed at length in his disputations, as in the famous one with Gardiner on the Real Presence; it is always scholar's work, careful and lucid. But when he sits down to produce a special effect all changes. He begins to carve with skill and in the hardest material. He is absorbed in a particular task, creative, highly conscious, and to his sense of beauty vastly satisfactory.

Cranmer being of such a kind in his work, that work reached heights which none other reached—not even Tyndale, whose great sweeps of rhythm underlie what was, a century after his death, to become the standard English Bible. But, unlike Tyndale—the other and older great master of prose in that generation which fixed the English tongue—Cranmer's work was deliberately limited, as its very nature demanded. It was set in small frames, as it were, and put apart from all the rest he did. Left to himself, I think he would have spent all his energies upon that one occupation in which he must have known himself to be a master, although contemporaries but vaguely appreciated his unique powers in that one field. For he was not a man to give an impression of power. Indeed, he did not impress at all. He shrank, withdrew, was suave and unguent—also by nature mild in his external manner. His presence did not suggest genius of any kind. When he was forced into public life there fell upon him that penalty of public life, the fixing on a man of a label which has little to do with his real self. He passed for a courtier or a protestant hero: he was no more than a poet. But the effect of a poet is enduring.

He was not of those whom a fountain of creation fills and who declaim, as it were, great matter. His art was of the kind which must work very slowly and in secret, isolated; his sentences when he desired to produce his effect must be perfected in detail, polished, lingered over, rearranged, until they had become so that one could feel them with the finger-nail and find no roughness. But when he was composing a letter, a proclamation—anything which had to be done for workaday business and where there was no time or occasion for lengthy toil—you hardly ever find in Cranmer's work even occasional beauty. Once or twice a phrase stands out, but in the great mass of what he has left he is as dull, turgid and confused as all his generation were; repeating himself, writing at vast length, using exaggerated terms, and seeming incapable sometimes of finishing his sentence at all. But when he says to himself: “Now I have something special to do; here I am on my mettle, I must produce some final thing”—then he constructs with a success only paralleled by the sonnets of Shakespeare.

I say “constructs.” Though we could not do the same ourselves, yet we can see how the hand is at work and how every word is thought out, each rhythm discovered, and the contour of the whole cameo carved. There is not in all that he has thus left of perfect English one lengthy passage; most of the Collects, which, with the isolated phrases of the Litany are his chief triumph, consist in single sentences—but they are sentences which most men who know the trade would give their eyes to have written. And since that endures which is carved in hard material, they have endured, and given endurance to the fabric—novel and revolutionary in his time, the institution at the root of which he stands—The Church of England.