And because it has lived these centuries we suppose that the 
authors had no doubts either. But the learned of the age, 
whatever their attitude to print, had doubts concerning the 
staying powers of the vernaculars. And some of their doubts 
appear in Spenser’s sonnet (Amoretti , LXXV):

     One day I wrote her name upon the strand, 
          But came the waves and washed it away: 
          Agayne I wrote it with a second hand,
          But came the tyde and made my paynes his prey. 
     Vayne man, sayd she, that doest in vaine assay
          A mortall thing so to immortalize: . . .

     “We must remember,” writes J. W. Lever in The  
Elizabethan Love Sonnet  (p. 57) “to what extent life itself is 
patterned on literary modes: how men in one age tend to