rude nor scant but the very fullness of rhetorical decorum.12 He therefore conjures for his 1553 Arte of Rhetorique a readership not of poor Latinists but “of all suche as are studious of Eloquence”: “Boldly … may I aduenture, and without feare step forth to offer that … which for the dignitie is so excellent, and for the use so necessarie,” he announces in his prologue to the revised and expanded edition of 1560 (Aivr). He dedicates both the 1553 and 1560 editions to his patron John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, whose “earnest … wish” that he “might one day see the precepts of Rhetorique set forth … in English” Wilson attributes not to his defects as a Latinist but to the “speciall desire and Affection” he “beare[s] to Eloquence” (Aiiv). He anticipates a time when the “perfect experience, of manifolde and weightie matters of the Commonweale, shall haue encreased the Eloquence, which alreadie doth naturally flowe” in Dudley to such an extent that his own Arte will be “set … to Schoole” in Dudley’s home, “that it may learn Rhetorique of … daylie talke”—for men learn best, he concludes, by following “their neyghbours deuice” (Aiiiv).
The fancy that eloquence might be schooled by an Englishman’s “daylie talke” or patterned on one’s “neyghbours deuice” upends Elyot’s fantasy of the English home as a nursery for Latinity and issues a bracing challenge to Ascham’s conviction that the “trewe Paterne of Eloquence” must be sought not “in common taulke, but in priuate bookes.”13 Indeed, although for Ascham the imitation of foreign eloquence recommends itself as a more profitable, less perilous alternative to actual travel abroad, in Wilson’s view the two pursuits are dangerously kin. Having forsaken their mother country and mother tongue, he observes, “some farre iorneid ientlemen at their returne home, like as thei loue to goe in forraine apparel, so thei will pouder their talke with oversea language,” but no less foolish are those would-be eloquent speakers who “seeke so far for outlandish English, that they forget altogether their mothers language.” Orphaned and alienated by their own affectations, they “will say, they speake in their mother tongue,” but “if some of their mothers were aliue, they were not able to tell what they say.” The hybrid tongues that result from such excursions, whether literal or rhetorical, are invariably ludicrous and ineffective, “as if an Oratour that professeth to vtter his mind in plaine Latin, would needes speake Poetrie, and farre fetched colours of straunge antiquitie” (86r). Actual foreign loan-words, Wilson implies, are merely the most obvious sign of linguistic corruption: the enticements of “straunge antiquitie”—excessive ornamentation, pseudo-archaisms, and pretentious classicisms—lure even educated speakers beyond the bounds of rhetorical community. “But thou saiest, the olde antiquitee doeth like thee best, because it is good, sobre, & modest,” he jibes. “Ah, liue man as thei did before thee, and speake thy mynde now, as menne do at this daie.” Instead of fretting over England’s infelicitous isolation or the distinctions between its speech and the language of classical authors, he urges readers to learn from the classics precisely the integrity of their own native speech: “[R]emember that, whiche Cesar saith, beware as long as thou liuest, of straunge woordes, as thou wouldest take hede and eschewe greate rockes in the Sea” (2r).
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