effort at permitting the figures to march, for the first time, in English. Here Sherry had an opportunity to provide the English reader with additional words, ideas, and material to be employed in vernacular communication. His efforts in his works on rhetoric, the two editions of the Treatise, provided the sixteenth century Englishman with the identical schemes and tropes which had been a heritage of the Latin language since antiquity. Hence the work can be called a complicated ordering of the figures, but it is also a sincere attempt to provide in English those figures which would lend ornateness to the expression of an idea.

To indicate that the Treatise was part of a continuing school of rhetoric, we must consider a few rhetoricians subsequent to Sherry’s work. Indeed, one notices the continuance of dictionaries of figures which carry the admonition that the usual manner of utterance was to be despised. Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), although preserving the classical idea of rhetoric, also felt the definition of a figure employed in communication involved the uncommon. Twenty-seven years subsequent to Sherry, England again has a pure catalogue of the figures; this is Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence. More elaborate than the Treatise, it too suggests that rhetoric is decoration. Continued interest in the stylistic tools is also seen in Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589). When we move to the latter part of the sixteenth century and then change the genre as exemplified in Day’s The English Secretorie, we see a stylistic extension to the art of letter writing which borrowed rhetorical terms and rules and applied them to written correspondence. The emphasis in these rhetorics on style is the same: ornateness in communication is achieved through using the figures.

When we look in the opposite direction, to works which preceded Sherry, the figures, definitions, and examples in the Treatise derive more from contemporaries than from the ancients. It relies extensively upon intermediaries. Sherry explains that Erasmus and Mosellanus will be major sources. Hence the De Copia, the Ecclesiastae, and the Tabulae de schematibus et tropis are used with regularity. Although further removed in time, the Rhetorica ad Herennium is the primary ancient source. But beyond this first-hand reliance on the ancients, examples from Vergil, Cicero, and Terence, to mention several, as well as definitions of the figures, depend heavily upon neo-classical intermediaries.

Appended to the text on the figures of rhetoric is a seemingly gratuitous section entitled “That chyldren oughte to be taught and brought vp gently in vertue and learnynge, and that euen forthwyth from theyr natiuitie: a declamacion of a briefe theme, by Erasmus of Roterodame.” This essay occupies almost two-thirds of the Treatise and receives its first English translation from the Latin at the hands of Sherry. William Woodward in his Desiderius Erasmus Concerning the Aim and Method of Education gave us another English translation in 1904. One other translation, in German, by August Israel, is entitled “Vortrag über die Nothwendigkeit, die Knaben gleich von der Geburt an in einer für Freigeborne würdigen Weise sittlich und wissenschaftlich ausbilden zu lassen.”

The reason for the inclusion of the Erasmian essay is never clearly stated in the other sections of the Treatise. Nor do the other translators suppose a reason. From the internal evidence of the essay and from headnotes preceding it, we may assume that the purpose is one of supplying readers with an example of amplification of a brief theme, first illustrated in miniature, and then full blown into a long declamation. The essay does not appear to be illustrating