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Updated: May 10, 2025
From the beginning, his style has attracted the attention of the few and no one, I am sure, has ever written a three line review of a book by Saltus without referring to it. Mme. Amélie Rives has quoted Oscar Wilde as saying to her one night at dinner, "In Edgar Saltus's work passion struggles with grammar on every page!" Percival Pollard has dubbed him a "prose paranoiac," and Elbert Hubbard says, "He writes so well that he grows enamoured of his own style and is subdued like the dyer's hand; he becomes intoxicated on the lure of lines and the roll of phrases. He is woozy on words locoed by syntax and prosody. The libation he pours is flavoured with euphues. It is all like a cherry in a morning Martini." A phrase which Remy de Gourmont uses to describe Villiers de l'Isle Adam might be applied with equal success to the author of "The Lords of the Ghostland": "L'idéalisme de Villiers était un véritable idéalisme verbal, c'est-
Euphues, wishing to convince his listeners of the inferiority of outward to inward perfection, pursues the following argument: The foule Toade hath a fayre stone in his head, the fine golde is found in the filthy earth; the sweet kernell lyeth in the hard shell; vertue is harboured in the heart of him that most men esteeme misshappen.
The meeting is at supper, and the conversation turns on the question "often disputed, but never determined, whether the qualities of the minde, or the composition of the man, cause women most to lyke, or whether beautie or wit move men most to love." Euphues shows so much ingenuity in the discussion of this interesting subject that Lucilla transfers her affections to him.
Hooker's prose is as carefully wrought as Lyly's and far more rhythmical. Both were experimenting with English prose in different fields, serving to teach succeeding writers what to imitate and to avoid. Unlike Euphues and the Arcadia, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is more valuable for its thought than for its form of expression.
A boy returned with more vices than he went forth with pence, and was able to sin both by experience and authority. Lest he should be thought to speak with uncertain voice upon this matter Lyly gives Euphues a story to tell in which the chief character describes the effect of traveling upon himself.
The fact is that the very confusedness, the many undeveloped sides, of Euphues, make it much more of an ancestor of the modern novel than if it were more of a piece. The quicquid agunt homines is as much the province of the novel as of the satire; and there is more than something of this as it affected Elizabethan times in Euphues.
It would also be impossible to devise a style less suited to prose narrative, except of a very peculiar kind and on a small scale, than that either of Euphues or of the Arcadia, which, though an uncritical tradition credits it with driving out Lyly's, is practically only a whelp of the same litter.
The first author to give them these things was John Lyly, whose book Euphues was for the five or six years following its publication a fashionable craze that infected all society and gave its name to a peculiar and highly artificial style of writing that coloured the work of hosts of obscure and forgotten followers.
The unconscionable amount of talk and of writing "about it and about it" which Euphues and the minor Euphuist romances display is at least as prominent in the Arcadia: and this talk rarely takes a form congenial to the modern novel reader's demands.
He may or may not have taken a hint from Thackeray on the re-introduction of characters in other books a pleasant device long antedating the nineteenth century, since one finds it in Lyly's "Euphues." Popular Sentiment in "The Warden."
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