"Allowing that Jonson's remark may only apply to the "Calendar", Bruce Robert McElderry Jr. states, after a detailed investigation of the "FQ"s diction, that Jonson's statement "is a skillful epigram; but it seriously misrepresents the truth if taken at anything like its face value".The number of archaisms used in the poem is not overwhelming—one source reports thirty-four in Canto I of Book I, that is, thirty-four words out of a total forty-two hundred words, less than one percent.