Erasmus gives Terence the first place amongst Latin writers, adding Plautus with more hesitation and with a stipulation for carefully selected plays. And in a letter written about 1489 to an anonymous friend he tilts with vehemence against the doctrine of certain homunciones imperituli, imo lividuli, who maintain that Terence is no fit reading for Christians, and explains to their ignorance that the end of dramatic writing lies precisely in the refutation of vice. Erasmus is closely followed by his English disciple, Sir Thomas Elyot, whose defence of comedies in The Governour (1531), as no 'doctrinall of rybaudrie' but 'a mirrour of man's life, wherin iuell is not taught but discouered', served as a standard authority to be quoted in support of much later apologetic. Nor is the point of view confined to what may be called the secular wing of humanism. The Terentian school-play is an essential feature in the pedagogy of such convinced reformers as Philip Melanchthon at Wittenberg and John Sturm at Strasburg,[1] and from Sturm the tradition passes direct to one of the most scholarly and by no means one of the least austere of early English Protestants, Roger Ascham. It is to be observed, however, that Ascham's concern for Terence is wholly on the side of letters and Latinity. Both Vives and Erasmus had had their moments of uneasiness as to how far, after all, the ethics of pagan Rome were quite meet to be assimilated by Christian youth. Vives would expurgate both Plautus and Terence, and Erasmus Plautus at least. Ascham, very much impressed with the demoralizing influence of Italian books and Italian manners on English civilization, has no doubt at all that, necessary as both Plautus and Terence are to the schoolmaster, their matter is but 'base stuff' for the contemplation of the budding divine or civil servant. Views similar to Ascham's had already established themselves amongst both Catholic and Protestant teachers, and the attempt to combine Roman impeccability of phrase with Christian impeccability of theme and incident had produced the remarkable dramatic type known as the 'Christian Terence'.[2] This had had its vernacular, as well as its Latin, developments in many lands. Its acceptability in the eyes of the earlier reformers in England may be illustrated from the chapter De honestis ludis, which forms part of the treatise De regno Christi written by Martin Bucer as a New Year's gift
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