Page 89 - Literacy in the New Media Age

78 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

others in the family, are one well-known example. But that writing was very
much closer to transcription of speech.
Inevitably it was the forms of the educated elites and of their public forms of
speech which became the basis for their writing. The nearly half-page-long
paragraphs of the writings of Bacon, Hobbes, Newton or Milton, with their
paragraph-long ‘sentences’, were the result of the mixing of two resources – the
‘learned’ grammars of Greek and Latin and its structures of public oratory with
English speech.
The first example comes from John Milton’s tract against censorship,
Areopagitica. Its sentence-structures and cadences are influenced by the
structures of written Greek and Latin, both of which an educated person was
expected to be competent in, but these sentence forms come from the forms of
speech as public oratory.

Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together almost
inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven
with the knowledge of evill, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly
to be discern’d, that those confused seeds which were impos’d on Psyche as
an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixt.
It was from out the rinde of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good
and evill as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the World. And
perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evill,
that is to say of knowing good by evill. As therefore the state of man now
is; what wisdome can there be to choose what continence to forbeare
without the knowledge of evill? He that can apprehend and consider vice
with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet
distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring
Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloisterd vertue, unexercis’d &
unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of
the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and
heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity
much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is
contrary. That vertue therefore which is but a youngling in the
contemplation of evill, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her
followers, and rejects it, is but a blank vertue, not a pure; her whitenesse is
but an excrementall whitenesse; which was the reason why our sage and
serious Poet Spencer, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than
Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the person of Guion,
brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the bowr
of earthly blisse that he might see and know, and yet abstain. Since
therefore the knowledge and survay of vice is in this world so necessary to
the constituting of human vertue, and the scanning of error to the
confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with lesse danger scout