The progress of English prose is a subject of great interest, and one that has not as yet been thoroughly treated from the historical point of view. Here, as elsewhere in literary, as well as scientific subjects, the inductive method must be employed, and by selection and comparison the advance made from century to century may be indicated. Any treatment of the subject making the smallest pretension to fullness should begin at least as early as the second half of the fourteenth century, with the prose of Wyclif and his contemporaries, after the native and foreign elements of the language had become so blended into one that what was once foreign was no longer felt to be so. The progress should be traced through the fifteenth century, marked by the names of Mandeville—whose so-called ‘Travels’ has at last found its true historical position,—Pecock, Malory and Caxton, to the first half of the sixteenth century, when prose-writers become more numerous, and the language becomes more flexible and better suited to the purposes of prose, as seen in the writings of Sir Thomas More and his controversial opponent, William Tyndale, Sir Thomas Elyot, whose “Boke called the Governour” is a real land-mark of English prose, Bishop Hugh Latimer, the most forcible and witty preacher of his time, and Roger Ascham, who connects the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, and who deliberately uses English for his works, although it would have been “more easier” for him to write in Latin.
Sir Thomas More, Utopia, and the Representation of Henry VIII, 1529-1533
