Naples to live with fair looks. I will so frame myself as all youth hereafter shall rather rejoice to see mine amendment than be animated to follow my former life. Philosophy, physic, divinity, shall be my study. Oh, the hidden secrets of nature, the express image of moral virtues, the equal balance of justice, the medicines to heal all diseases, how they begin to delight me! The Axiomaes of Aristotle, the Maxims of Justinian, the Aphorisms of Galen, have suddenly made such a breach into my mind, that I seem only to desire them that did only erst detest them."

Here the author might certainly fall under the suspicion of a dramatic and satirical intent, but in the next sentence he speaks so plainly in his own voice that the doubt is resolved

"If wit be employed in the honest study of learning, what thing so precious as wit? If in the idle trade of love, what thing more pestilent than wit?"

A plainer instance of those rare occasions where the story-teller gets the better of the didactic moralist occurs in the passage describing the voyage to England, where Euphues tells his friend a long and tedious story, balancing and finishing every sentence, until Philautus, goaded to the point of abandoning the alliterative convention, remarks, "In faith, Euphues, thou hast told a long tale, the beginning I have forgotten, the middle I understand not, and the end hangeth not together; . . . in the mean time, it were best for me to take a nap, for I cannot brook these seas, which provoke my stomach sore."

But generally when the encumbering style is thrown off for a sentence or two, it is in the interest of didactic

rather than of dramatic effect, and then Lyly is to be found expressing himself in plain pithy English, and coining or adopting homely proverbs like these

"It is the eye of the master that fatteth the horse, and the love of the woman that maketh the man."

"Thou must halt cunningly to beguile a cripple.” "It is a blind goose that cometh to the fox's sermon." And when Philautus consults a sorcerer for a lovecharm, "C'était là," says M. Jusserand, "une excellente occasion de parler des serpents et des crapauds, et le magicien n'y manque pas." But at the end of the display of lore there follows the pointed comment, "The best charm for an aching tooth is to pull it out, and the best remedy for love, to wear it out."

The fashions and customs of the English on which Lyly spends his gravest invective are those that are also attacked by Ascham, Stubbes, and Howell. During the long period represented by these three names, an Englishman was a by-word for the readiness with which he adopted foreign costumes, airs, manners, oaths, and habits. The "lisping, affecting fantastico," who proved that he had "swam in a gondola" by wearing strange suits and swearing strange oaths, was the stock subject for patriotic satire for fifty years after Euphues. It is to the extravagant fashions of women, however, that Lyly chiefly addresses himself. "Take from them their periwigs, their paintings, their jewels, their rolls, their bolsterings, and thou shalt soon perceive that a woman is the least part of herself, ... an apothecary's shop of sweet confections, a pedlar's pack of new fangles." And he wittily excuses himself to the "grave matrons and

honest maidens of Italy," by saying, "You ought no more to be aggrieved with that which I have said than the mint-master to see the coiner hanged." One woman only is raised above all censure, and she, it is needless to say, is the Queen. Euphues and Philautus come to England chiefly to see her, and the praises bestowed on her would be held exceptionally extravagant if they could not so easily be paralleled from the dramatists.

"Eliza, that most sacred dame,

Whom none but saints and angels ought to name,"

who rules over the realm that, by another familiar conceit, is called Elysium, is spoken of with bated breath by the court-follower, who excuses himself even for naming her, whom "neither art nor heart can set forth as she deserveth. But in this we imitate the old painters of Greece, who, drawing in their tables the portraiture of Jupiter, were every hour mending it, but durst never finish it, and being demanded why they began that which they could not end, they answered, in that we show him to be Jupiter, whom every one may begin to paint, but no one can perfect. In the like manner mean we to draw in part the praises of her whom we cannot throughly portray, and in that we signify her to be Elizabeth."

There is no more signal instance of the imitative tendencies that Lyly attacks than his own style, which has been shown by careful study and research to be a motley compound made up from many sources. From Ovid, Plutarch, and Pliny he borrows whole phrases, passages, or even discourses; the balanced antithetical sentence is modelled, it is said, on Guevara or the

English translations of Guevara by Berners, North, and others which were popular before Lyly's time, and which lent him also the suggestion of the free employment of comparisons from natural history; while a fanciful prose alliteration is to be found here and there in several earlier writers. And yet the style is Lyly's own, although the materials are borrowed, and those who would rob him of originality must rob Shakespeare too. The immediate popularity of Euphues is in itself sufficient evidence that a taste was already formed: the writer who has no predecessors will also have no readers. Lyly's work was to combine and carry to their extreme development the literary fashions that he found in vogue, and to raise them to the dignity of a convention; hence he is justly called the inventor of a new English. To make of his style a mere theft is as impossible as to make of it a mere affectation. And the importance of that style is so great, both as typical of the time, and as marking a crucial point in the history of prose fiction, that a few words will be spent not amiss in the attempt to show its bearings.

The age of Elizabeth is pre-eminently an age of poetry, of which prose may be regarded as merely the overflow. Poetry as an art attained a range and perfection that has never since been reached, and much material that now finds expression in prose forms was then drawn into the main current of verse. Philosophy, autobiography, history, morals, all found their natural expression in verse form. A later generation has found cause for wonder or incredulity in the fact that both Shakespeare and Sidney "coined their hearts and dropped their blood for

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drachmas" in the form of the sonnet, and were proud to forego their privacy so they might gain the stamp of art. Yet no one has questioned the trenchant sincerity of Greene's autobiographical poems; Michael Drayton versified his historical gazetteer; and Sir John Davies shaped his philosophy in stanza form. "Seeing," says Nash, "that poetry is the very same with philosophy, the fables. of poets must of necessity be fraught with wisdom and knowledge, as framed of those men which have spent all their time and studies in the one and in the other." And he even censures some of the inevitable consequences of this breadth, as well as height, of the scope of poetry, whereby, he complains, it has come to be thought that rhyming is poetry. "Hence come our babbling Ballets, and our new-found Songs and Sonnets, which every rednose fiddler hath at his fingers' end, and every ignorant ale-knight will breathe forth over the pot, as soon as his brain waxeth hot."

Those instincts of poetry, which cause it to seek music and form, were no way blunted in consequence of the diversity of subjects admitted. And so it came about that the prose of the time (all of which, it may safely be said, bears the mark of the sovereignty of poetry) felt the double influence, and approximated to poetry either in the elaborated figurative method of its treatment, or in the rhythmical balance of its form, or in both. Matthew Arnold finds the prose of Chapman intolerable because of its riotous excess of figure, unrestrained by the coercive means supplied by the rules of verse. And certainly there is much of the prose of the time, besides Chapman's, that, lacking the wings of