Its writers were using a new tongue, for English was enriched beyond all recognition with borrowings from the ancient authors; and like all artists who become possessed of a new medium, they used it to excess.

The early Elizabethans' use of the new prose was very like the use that educated Indians make of English to-day.

It is not that these write it incorrectly, but only that they write too richly.

And just as fuller use and knowledge teaches them spareness and economy and gives their writing simplicity and vigour, so seventeenth century practice taught Englishmen to write a more direct and undecorated style and gave us the smooth, simple, and vigorous writing of Dryden--the first really modern English prose.

But the Elizabethans loved gaudier methods; they liked highly decorative modes of expression, in prose no less than in verse.