The _Treatise_ does have merit. The work cannot be judged entirely by tallying its meager number of editions, its lack of thoroughness, or its artificial divisions. Its signal contribution rests upon the fact that it is a pioneering effort at permitting the figures to march, for the first time, in English. Here Sherry had an opportunity to provide the English reader with additional words, ideas, and material to be employed in vernacular communication. His efforts in his works on rhetoric, the two editions of the _Treatise_, provided the sixteenth century Englishman with the identical schemes and tropes which had been a heritage of the Latin language since antiquity. Hence the work can be called a complicated ordering of the figures, but it is also a sincere attempt to provide in English those figures which would lend ornateness to the expression of an idea.
To indicate that the _Treatise_ was part of a continuing school of rhetoric, we must consider a few rhetoricians subsequent to Sherry's work. Indeed, one notices the continuance of dictionaries of figures which carry the admonition that the usual manner of utterance was to be despised. Thomas Wilson's _The Arte of Rhetorique_ (1553), although preserving the classical idea of rhetoric, also felt the definition of a figure employed in communication involved the uncommon. Twenty-seven years subsequent to Sherry, England again has a pure catalogue of the figures; this is Peacham's _Garden of Eloquence_. More elaborate than the _Treatise_, it too suggests that rhetoric is decoration. Continued interest in the stylistic tools is also seen in Puttenham's The _Arte of English Poesie_ (1589). When we move to the latter part of the sixteenth century and then change the genre as exemplified in Day's _The English Secretorie_, we see a stylistic extension to the art of letter writing which borrowed rhetorical terms and rules and applied them to written correspondence. The emphasis in these rhetorics on style is the same: ornateness in communication is achieved through using the figures.
When we look in the opposite direction, to works which preceded Sherry, the figures, definitions, and examples in the _Treatise_ derive more from contemporaries than from the ancients. It relies extensively upon intermediaries. Sherry explains that Erasmus and Mosellanus will be major sources. Hence the _De Copia_, the _Ecclesiastae_, and the _Tabulae de schematibus et tropis_ are used with regularity. Although further removed in time, the _Rhetorica ad Herennium_ is the primary ancient source. But beyond this first-hand reliance on the ancients, examples from Vergil, Cicero, and Terence, to mention several, as well as definitions of the figures, depend heavily upon neo-classical intermediaries.