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Updated: May 10, 2025
Not merely so long as men aimed at the eccentric and contorted styles of Euphues and the Arcadia, but so long as the old splendid and gorgeous, but cumbrous and complicated pre-Restoration style lasted, romances were possible, but novels were not.
His carefully balanced periods were valuable lessons in rhetoric, and his book became a manual of polite conversation and introduced that fashion of witty repartee, which is evident enough in Shakspere's comic dialogue. In 1580 appeared the second part, Euphues and his England, and six editions of the whole work were printed before 1598. Lyly had many imitators.
"I see now that, as the fish Scolopidus in the flood Araxes at the waxing of the moon is as white as the driven snow, and at the waning as black as the burnt coal; so Euphues, which at the first increasing of our familiarity was very zealous, is now at the last cast become most faithless."
The sentence represents one of the common forms in Euphues, such as this: 'To the stomach quatted with dainties all delicates seem queasie. Sometimes the balance is preserved by three words on a side.
Euphues, then, as well in the story in which he figures, as afterward in the essays or which he is the supposed author, is the model of a young man at once attractive in appearance, and possessing the mental qualities most calculated to please.
One woman only escapes his censure, and she, of course, is the Queen, whom Euphues and his companion in the book come to England to see. In the main the teaching of Euphues inculcates a humane and liberal, if not very profound creed, and the book shares with The Fairy Queen the honour of the earlier Puritanism the Puritanism that besides the New Testament had the Republic.
Even here, he had had the "notion of the notion" supplied to him by Lyly in Euphues: and a tolerably skilful advocate would not have so very much difficulty in claiming the book as one of the tribe of Euphuist pamphlets. But Jack Wilton the "traveller" is a little more of a person than the pedagogic Euphues and the shadowy Philautus.
Thus Lyly, in his “Euphues,” 1597, addressing the ladies, hopes they will favour his work, “writing their judgments as you do the poesies in your rings, which are always next to the finger, not to be seen of him that holdeth you by the hand, and yet known by you that wear them on your hands.” Such jingling rhymes were in great request, and exerted the ingenuity of poetasters and small wits.
Many entire departments of prose literature were as yet undeveloped. Fiction was represented outside of the Arcadia and Euphues already mentioned chiefly by tales translated or imitated from Italian novelle. These translations are mainly of interest as having furnished plots to the English dramatists.
There are two principal and peculiar gifts in the nature of man, knowledge and reason; the one commandeth, and the other obeyeth: these things neither the whirling wheel of fortune can change, neither the deceitful cavillings of worldlings separate, neither sickness abate, neither age abolish." LILLY's Euphues, 1586.
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