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In Euphues, however, the love story serves chiefly as a peg on which to hang discussions on fickleness, youthful follies, friendship, and divers other subjects. Lyly aimed to produce artistic prose, which would render his meaning clear and impressive.
The name "Euphuism" became a current description of an artificial way of using words that overflowed out of writing into speech and was in the mouths, while the vogue lasted, of everybody who was anybody in the circle that fluttered round the Queen. The style of Euphues was parodied by Shakespeare and many attempts have been made to imitate it since.
Lilly, the author of Euphues, says in his Endymion, "The love of men to women is a thing common and of course; the friendship of man to man, infinite and immortal." And indeed it is to the influence of the Euphues that much of the poetic ardor of language characterizing the masculine friendship of the time was due.
Now every one of these devices is at least as old as Isocrates. It was in this very fashion that Euphues and his Friends delighted to serve and return their choicest tennis balls of Elizabethan phrase. But little De Quincey could pull out the various stops of polyphonic prose even more cleverly than John Lyly; and if one will read the admirable description of St.
He wrote with the avowed purpose of instructing courtiers and gentlemen how to live. Euphues is full of grave reflections and weighty morals, and is indeed a collection of essays on education, on friendship, on religion and philosophy, and on the favourite occupation and curriculum of Elizabethan youth foreign travel.
In 1579 John Lyly published his curious romance, "Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit," a work which attained a great popularity, and made the word Euphuism an abstract term in the language to express the ornate and antithetical style of which this book is the most marked example. In Lyly's own day it was said by Edward Blount that the nation was "in his debt for a new English which hee taught them."
A second part of the work appeared in the following year, in which Euphues and Philautus are represented on a visit to England. Philautus marries, and Euphues, after eulogizing the English government, Elizabeth, and all her court, retires forever "to the bottom of the mountain Silexedra."
It was published in the spring of 1579 by Gabriel Cawood, 'dwelling in Paules Churchyard, and was followed one year later by a second part, Euphues and his England. These books were the work of John Lyly, a young Oxford Master of Arts. Remembering the willingness of i and y to bear one another's burdens, we may still exclaim, with Dr.
A nearer approach to the coming Comedy is found in the plays of John Lyly preceding his Euphues.
The first Euphuists were looked upon as "refiners of speech," and Queen Elizabeth and the ladies at her court did their best to speak as much in the manner of Euphues as they could. But all men at all times are unconscious Euphuists, in so far as they try to say ugly and unpleasant things in a way which will make them sound pleasant.
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