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08982_Field_TCGG T747.txt
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C. S. Lewis in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century
(p. 21) writes:
It is largely to the humanists that we owe the curious
conception of the ‘classical’ period in a language, the
correct or normative period before which all was immature
or archaic and after which all was decadent. Thus Scaliger
tells us that Latin was ‘rude’ in Plautus, ‘ripe’ from
Terence to Virgil, decadent in Martial and Juvenal, senile in
Ausonius (Poetices viii). Vives says much the same (De
tradendis disciplinis iv). Vida, more wildly, makes all Greek
poetry after Homer a decline (Poeticorum I, 139). When
once this superstition was established it led naturally to
the belief that good writing in the fifteenth or sixteenth
century meant writing which aped as closely as possible
that of the chosen period in the past. All real