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| Style | Rugged, homely, sometimes slovenly; but always clear, terse vehement, stinging, as if feeling ever the galling shackles of spiritual despotism. The mind intent upon the eternal tragedy of the conscience is disdainful of elegance. |
| Rank | Like Bacon, Scotus, and Occam, an audacious partisan; unlike them, a dexterous politician. The organizer of a religious order, the founder of our later English prose; first of the great reformers and last of the great Scholastics. The grandeur of his position is marked, as well by the reluctance to adopt extreme measures against him, as by the admission of a contemporary and opponent, who acknowledged him to be 'the greatest theologian of the day, second to none as a philosopher, and incomparable as a schoolman.' To be the first, amidst a host of prejudices and errors, to strike out into a new and untried way, indicates a genius above the common order. |
| Character | Devout, benevolent, austere; a man of sterling sense, of amazing industry, of ardent zeal, with the stout-heartedness that dared be singular for God and the right. Altogether a brave and admirable spirit, open to the divine significance of life; seeing through the show of things, believing in the truth of things, and striking with the poets, in a troublous period, the first blow of demolition against an ancient thing grown false ..." |
| Influence | To Wycliffe is due the establishment of a sacred dialect, which, with slight variation ... has continued to be the language of devotion to the present day ... He and his school introduced or popularized many Latin and Romance terms; and thus enriched literary diction ... from which the Shakespeares draw their stock of living and breathing words. |
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