Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (71-2):
The cult of Latin. After the thinness, the ‘transparency’, of mediaeval authors, the reading world was once again drunk on antiquity, Greece and Rome; the most educated wrote in Latin; each writer wanted to show that he knew more Latin than the other; there are bales of their Latin poems; the Italians took over the style and extended the vocabularly, the Spaniards and English imitated the Italians; Camoens tried it in Portugal. It was the gold rush for the largest vocabulary. I suspect that Marlowe started to parody himself in Hero and Leander. He had begun with serious intentions.
I recognize that this suspicion may be an error.
The next phase in France and England was to attempt to squeeze the katachrestical rhetoric into a strait-waist coat.
