Ariost," and he was not without his own relish of conceits, vigorously as he attacked the fool in far-fetched livery of mind and dress. The Eng lish mind under it all. o' decay new life. What Hall, writing a few years after Lyly, censured in verse, Ascham's unaffected prose had censured yet more vigorously in his "Schoolmaster," a work published by his widow seven or eight years before "Euphues" appeared. There is reason for suggesting, if not for believing, that John Lyly drew from this work of Ascham's both the motive and the title of his fashionable novel. "Euphues" paints the same Italian Circe against whose snares Ascham warned his countrymen, reminding them that "if a gentleman must needs travel into Italy, he shall do well to look to the life of the wisest traveller that ever travelled thither, set out by the wisest writer that ever spake with tongue, God's doctrine only excepted, and that is Ulysses in Homer." The "Schoolmaster" observed that Ulysses "is not commended so much nor so oft in Homer, because he was Toλúrрожоç, that is, skilful in men's manners and fashions, as because he was Toλuuris, that is, wise in all purposes and ware in all places." Against Circe's enchantment Homer's remedy was the herb Moly, "with the black root and white flower; sour at the first, but sweet in the end, which Hesiodus termeth the study of virtue." This was of all things most contrary to what Ascham called "the precepts of fond books of late translated out of Italian into English, sold in every shop in London. . Ten sermons at Paul's Cross do not so much good for moving men to true doctrine as one of these books do harm with enticing men to ill living." Let it here be remembered that the period of English literature more directly influenced by the frivolities of Italy dates from the time of our Reformation in the Church, and runs through years in which minds engaged with intense activity upon the settlement of great religious questions became also more and more deeply engaged in political assertion of the rights of subjects. Throughout the days of civil war and of the Commonwealth Italian influence extends. To that part of the period thus defined, in which we find the greatest prevalence of literary affectation, belongs also the truest and most earnest work on which the pens of Englishmen have ever been engaged—our authorised translation of the Bible. To the same period belongs the best part of our literature. High and true thoughts, with sturdy deeds, were called for by the times. Into the words of vigorous men, living energetic lives of thought or action, the demand for ingenious expression brought new force. There were men trained in this school able to satisfy to the full, out of their natural wit, at once the claims of truth in art and the popular desire for clever simile, strong line, and pithy phrase. The affectation of the weak forced into a peculiarly emphatic utterance all the originality and power of the strong. To this view of English Euphuism we shall have to recur. At present it is only necessary to remember that, by whomsoever fashions happen to be set, we must not take clothes for character. Lyly had children, and his book shows, as we shall find, that he thought seriously for himself, and agreed with Ascham upon questions of education. He was a little man, with a wife and family; he smoked tobacco, and was a wit in society, with a heart full of seriousness; he was a hungry reader of good books, and to the last a hungry waiter on the Court, that repaid his honest labouring to entertain it well according to its humour, only with promise unfulfilled. "Thirteen years," he says, in a petition to the Queen, presented in or about the year when "Euphues" was published, "thirteen years your Highness's servant, but yet nothing. A thousand hopes, but all nothing; a hundred My last will is shorter promises, but yet nothing. than mine invention; but three legacies, patience to my creditors, melancholy without measure to my friends, and beggary without shame to my family." Surely a touching hint-and it is all the hint we have-of the home life of the Euphuist! Lyly still in our own day has suffered injustice. The traditional view of his "Euphues" is represented by the saying of Gifford, that it "did incalculable mischief by vitiating the taste, corrupting the language, and introducing a spurious and unnatural mode of conversation and action." Duration of Lyly's popularity. The work passed through ten editions in fifty-six years, and then was not again reprinted. Of these editions, the first four were issued during twenty-three years of Elizabeth's reign, the next four appeared in the reign of James, and the last two in the reign of Charles I.; the latest edition before our own time being that of the year 1636, eleven years after that king's accession. Its readers were the men who were discussing Hampden's stand against ship-money. During all this time, and for some years beyond it, worship of conceits was in this country a literary paganism, that gave strength to the strong as well as weakness to the weak, lasting from Surrey's days until the time when Dryden was in his mid career. It was of this culte that the Euphuist undoubtedly aspired to be the high priest, but it was not of his establishing. Still less, of course, are we entitled to accept the common doctrine that it had its origin in Donne's fashionable poetry and in the pedantry of James I. We may pause upon Lyly for especial illustration of the abiding earnestness that underlies all transient fashions of our literature. Of the treatise on education, forming so prominent a part of "Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit," the main doctrines are such as these. No youth is to be taught with stripes. Ascham and Lyly were alone in maintaining this doctrine Lyly himself a practical Englishman. against the strongest contrary opinion. Life is divided into remission and study. As there is watching, so is there sleep; ease is the sauce of labour; holiday the other half of work. Children should exercise a discreet silence: "let them also be admonished, that, when they shall speak, they speak nothing but truth; to lie is a vice most detestable, not to be suffered in a slave, much less in a son." Fathers should study to maintain by love and by example influence over their sons as they advance to manhood; let them with mildness forgive light offences, and remember that they themselves have been young. .Some light faults let them dissemble as though they knew them not, and seeing them let them not seem to see them, and hearing them let them not seem to hear. We can easily forget the offences of our friends, be they never so great, and shall we not forgive the escapes of our children, be they never so small?" Let the body be kept in its pure strength by honest exercise, and let the mind, adds Lyly, falling again into the track of censure followed by all satirists of the day, “not be carried away with vain delights, as with travelling into far and strange countries, where you shall see more wickedness than learn virtue and wit. Neither with costly attire of the new cut, the Dutch hat, the French hose, the Spanish rapier, the Italian hilt, and I know not what." There is nothing, he reminds youth, swifter than time, and nothing sweeter. We have not, as Seneca saith, little time to live, but we lose much; neither have we a short life by nature, but we make it shorter by naughtiness; our life is long if we know how to use it. The greatest commodity that we can yield unto our country, is with wisdom to bestow that talent which by grace was given us. Here Euphues repeats the closing sentences of the wise counsel of Eubulus, scorned by him in the days of his folly, and then passes to a direct exhortation to the study of the Bible. "Oh!" he exclaims, "I would gentlemen would sometimes sequester themselves from their own delights, and employ their wits in searching these heavenly divine mysteries." Whole pages contain Advancing still in earnestness as he presents his Euphues growing in wisdom and now wholly devoting himself to the study of the highest truth, a letter to the gentlemen-scholars in Athens prefaces a dialogue between Euphues and Atheos, which is an argument against the infidelity that had crept in from Italy. It is as earnest as if Latimer himself had preached it to the courtiers of King Edward. Euphues appeals solemnly to Scripture and the voice within ourselves. In citation from the sacred text consist almost his only illustrations; in this he abounds. nothing but the words of Scripture. ful and mythological adornment was so common to literature that the very Bible Lyly read-the Bishops' Bible-contained woodcut initials upon subjects drawn from Ovid's "Metamorphoses," and opened the Epistle to the Hebrews with a sketch of Leda and the Swan, Lyly, in the book which has been for so many years condemned unread, does not once mingle false ornament with reasoning on sacred things. He refers to the ancients only, at the outset of his argument, to show that the heathen had acknowledged a Creator; mentions Plato but to say that he recognised one whom we may call God omnipotent, glorious, immortal, unto whose similitude we that creep here on earth have our souls framed; and Aristotle, only to tell how, when he could not find out by the secrecy of nature the cause of the ebbing and the flowing of the sea, he cried, with a loud voice, O Thing of Things, have mercy upon me!" In twenty black-letter pages there are but three illustrations drawn from supposed properties of things. The single anecdote from profane history I will here quote from a discourse that introduces nearly all the texts incorporated in our Liturgy : "I have read of Themistocles, which having offended Philip, the King of Macedonia, and could no way appease his anger, meeting his |