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The very marked Euphuism of the prose portions, combined with some lyrical merit, makes the composition worth notice, and has led to its ascription to the pen of Lyly himself. It was, of course, composed and presented for her Majesty's delectation at a time when Lyly's plays were the delight of the court; but however grateful we may feel to Mr.
Looking back in after years, writers who, like Drayton, had lived through the movement from its very birth, could speak of Sidney as of the author who did first reduce Our tongue from Lyly's writing then in use, and could praise his style as a model of pure English. In spite of the generous, if misguided, efforts of occasional critics, posterity has not seen fit to endorse this view.
Although Lyly's romance itself lay outside the scope of this inquiry, we have already had, in the pastoral work of his imitators, ample opportunities of becoming acquainted with the peculiarities of the style he rendered fashionable.
There is no change in style when the narrative parts end and the dialogue begins. All the persons of the drama utter one strange tongue. They are no better than the characters in a Punch and Judy show, where one concealed manipulator furnishes voice for each of the figures. But in Lyly's novel there is not even an attempt at the most rudimentary ventriloquism.
While finding in Sidney's style the same historical importance as in Lyly's, we cannot but recognize that in itself Arcadianism was little if at all better than Euphuism.
Lyly died in 1606, leaving, as he said, but three legacies; "Patience to my creditors, Melancholie without measure to my friends, and Beggarie without shame to my family." The deeper meaning of Lyly's work, which lies beneath the surface of his similes and antitheses, has escaped almost all his critics. It is suggested by the title, "Euphues, The Anatomy of Wit."
I am taking him not to be a dullard but a poet. People did not commonly talk in the poetical way, heaven knows; people did not write in the poetic convention. There is a curious exception in Letter VIII of the Casket Letters from Mary to Bothwell. Lyly's most popular prose was accessible to Shakespeare.
The author, whoever he was, may have drawn a hint for his plot from Lyly's Gallathea, in which, it will be remembered, Venus promises to change one of the enamoured maidens into a man, or else, maybe, direct from the tale of Iphis in Ovid.
Since then, the verdict of posterity has been that Lyly corrupted the public taste, and introduced an affected and overloaded manner of writing which had a mischievous influence upon literature. A careful examination of Lyly's work, and of the condition of the English language in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, will not sustain either of these views.
The less impulsive Baconians and the Anti-Willians appear to ignore the well-known affected novels which were open to all the world, and are noted even in short educational histories of English literature. Shakespeare, in London, had only to look at the books on the stalls, to read or, if he had the chance, to see Lyly's plays, and read the poems of the time.
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