Their efforts failed, and their ideals had to wait for their acceptance
till the age of Dryden, when Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton, all of
them authors who consistently violated the standards of Cheke, had done
their work. The fine courtier who would talk nothing but Chaucer was in
Elizabeth's reign the saving of English verse. The beauty and richness
of Spenser is based directly on words he got from _Troilus and Cressida_
and the _Canterbury Tales_. Some of the most sonorous and beautiful
lines in Shakespeare break every canon laid down by the humanists.

"Th' extravagant and erring spirit hies
To his confine"

is a line, three of the chief words of which are Latin importations that
come unfamiliarly, bearing their original interpretation with them.
Milton is packed with similar things: he will talk of a crowded meeting
as "frequent" and use constructions which are unintelligible to anyone
who does not possess a knowledge--and a good knowledge--of Latin syntax.
Yet the effect is a good poetic effect. In attacking latinisms in the
language borrowed from older poets Cheke and his companions were
attacking the two chief sources of Elizabethan poetic vocabulary. All
the sonorousness, beauty and dignity of the poetry and the drama which
followed them would have been lost had they succeeded in their object,
and their verse would have been constrained into the warped and ugly
forms of Sternhold and Hopkins, and those with them who composed the
first and worst metrical version of the Psalms. When their idea
reappeared for its fulfilment phantasy and imagery had temporarily worn
themselves out, and the richer language made simplicity possible and
adequate for poetry.

There are other directions in which the classical revival influenced