Sir Thomas Elyot: author and diplomatist; born in Wiltshire, England, about 1490. The place of his education is not known, but the extent of his learning seems to prove him a university graduate. He held the office of clerk to the western assize from about 1511 to 1519, when he exchanged it for that of clerk of the king’s council, a position which he held for six years and a half, as he complained, without compensation and without thanks. In 1532 he was sent on embassies to the pope and to the emperor, and while on the latter mission received instructions to cause the arrest of the Reformer Tyndale, but failed in the attempt. Though highly honored by his contemporaries for his learning, Elyot received but slight pecuniary rewards from his patrons for either his literary or official labors, and spent his life in straitened circumstances. Died at Carlton, Cambridgeshire, 1546. Of his works the most noted is “The Boke named the Gouernour” (London, 1531), which is a moral treatise on the way to fit a man for the duties of governing. Among his twelve other books are “Of the Knowledge that maketh a Wise Man” (1533); “Bibliotheca” (1538), the first Latin-English dictionary; “The Image of Governance” (1540); “Preservative against Death” (1545); “Defense for Good Women” (1545).

  He wrote also an excellent Dictionary of Latine and English, if not the first, the best of that kind in that age; and England then abounding with so many learned Clergy-men, I know not which more to wonder at, that they mist, or he hit on so necessary a subject. Let me adde, Bishop Cooper grafted his Dictionary on the stocke of Sir Thomas Eliot.

  Sir Thomas Elyot’s “Governor” was designed to instruct men, especially great men, in good morals, and to reprove their vices.

  “The Governor” is one of those treatises, which, at an early period of civilization, when general education is imperfect, becomes useful to mould the manners and to inculcate the morals which should distinguish the courtier and the statesman. Elyot takes his future “Governor” in the arms of his nurse, and places the ideal being amid all the scenes which may exercise the virtues, or the studies which he develops. The work is dedicated to Henry the Eighth. The design, the imaginary personage, the author, and the patron are equally dignified. The style is grave; and it would not be candid in a modern critic to observe, that, in the progress of time, the good sense has become too obvious, and the perpetual illustrations from ancient history too familiar. The erudition in philology of that day has become a school-boy’s learning. They had then no other volumes to recur to, of any authority, but what the ancients had left…. “The Boke of the Governor” must now be condemned to the solitary imprisonment of the antiquary’s cell, who will pick up many curious circumstances relative to the manners of the age,—always an amusing subject of speculation, when we contemplate on the gradations of social life.

  Sir Thomas Elyot stands as a character altogether typical of the period, and is one of the pleasantest figures of the time; as an able lawyer and man of business, a clever diplomatist with a grand capacity for work, and an ornament to English knighthood because of his extensive knowledge, a man strictly honourable in nature, and of genuine piety. The unselfish Renaissance-zeal for culture, the impulse to learn and to teach, live vigorously in him, and his entire literary activity testifies to the fact. In addition to this we have in him that naïve, joyous hopefulness, lost for the greater part to our age, the faith in the power of aiding the enlightenment and improvement of men by means of popular moralizing writings.

  Sir Thomas Elyot’s place in English prose seems to fall, in other respects than mere chronological order, between Sir Thomas More and Roger Ascham. In the English that he wrote, he is somewhat less archaic than the former, and less modern than the latter. If Elyot is less cumbrous than More, he never attains the vivacity of Ascham. Charm of style was hardly as yet a gift to which English prose had attained. Elyot has many virtues—clearness and precision among them—but if he seldom falls below a certain level, he as seldom rises above it.

  It might be difficult to give any reason except the fact that it has been twice reprinted in the present century for the position held by “The Boke named the Governour,” still more difficult to account for the reprinting itself…. In the history of prose style Elyot is commendable rather than distinguished; free from obvious and glaring defects rather than possessed of distinct merits. He is rather too much given to long sentences; he has little or nothing of Fisher’s rhetorical devices, and while the romantic grace of his not much older contemporary Berners is far from him, so also is the deliberate classical plainness of his not very much younger contemporary Ascham. He is principally valuable as an example of the kind of prose which a cultivated man of ordinary gifts would be likely to write before the definite attempts of Ascham and his school.

  Elyot’s literary work, although it exhibits no striking originality, illustrates the wide culture and erudition of Henry VIII’s Court. Political philosophy and the theory of education chiefly interested him. His views were borrowed from the foreign writers of the Renaissance. Erasmus’s influence is plainly discernable. Pico della Mirandola, Francesco Patrizi the elder, and other less-known Italian authors were familiar to him. His intimate friends included Sir Thomas More and Roger Ascham. As a Greek scholar who first translated part of Isocrates into English, and as an early student of both Greek and Latin patristic literature, he well deserves to be remembered. That he should have written all his books in his native language gives him a high place among the pioneers of English prose literature. His style is clear, although its literary flavour is thin. His fame as a translator lived through Elizabeth’s reign.