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Updated: May 14, 2025
Whether he wrote in the character of a disappointed legacy-hunter or an empty town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or a flippant coquette, he wrote in the same pompous and unbending style. His speech, like Sir Piercy Shafton's Euphuistic eloquence, betrayed him under every disguise. Euphelia and Rhodoclea talk as finely as Imlac the poet, or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia.
And then, impatient of their intoxicating and tantalizing search, suddenly grown desperate, they clutched and stored away everything, and returned home tattered, soiled, bedecked with gold and with tinsel, laden with an immense uncouth burden of jewels, and broken wealth, and refuse and ordure, with pseudo-antique philosophy, with half-mediæval Dantesque and Petrarchesque poetry, with Renaissance science, with humanistic pedantry and obscenity, with euphuistic conceits and casuistic quibble, with art, politics, metaphysics civilization embedded in all manner of rubbish and abomination, soiled with all manner of ominous stains.
For, not much more than a year before, Fulke Greville had met at Delft a man whose external adornments were simpler; a somewhat slip-shod personage, whom he thus pourtrayed: "His uppermost garment was a gown," said the euphuistic Fulke, "yet such as, I confidently affirm, a mean-born student of our Inns of Court would not have been well disposed to walk the streets in.
He could snuff his candle at ten paces, sever his bamboo, divide the fingers of the hand with separate bullets without grazing the skin nay, more, as was said in the euphuistic phraseology of his admirers, send his ball between soul and body without impairing the integrity of either.
Moreover, in spite of the stiltedness of the style where the author yet remembers to be euphuistic, in spite of the long 'orations, 'passions, 'meditations' and the like, each carefully labelled and giving to the whole the air of a series of rhetorical exercises, in spite of the mediocre quality of most of the verses, if we except its one perfect gem, the romance yet retains not a little of its silvan and idyllic sweetness.
For, not much more than a year before, Fulke Greville had met at Delft a man whose external adornments were simpler; a somewhat slip-shod personage, whom he thus pourtrayed: "His uppermost garment was a gown," said the euphuistic Fulke, "yet such as, I confidently affirm, a mean-born student of our Inns of Court would not have been well disposed to walk the streets in.
It were a shame a little cold water should kill a man of reason, when you shall see a poore Mynow lie in it, that hath no understanding. As regards the euphuistic style, the passages already quoted will suffice, but it may be remarked that the marvellous natural history is also put under requisition.
Still, in the Euphuistic style, tedious and grotesque as it often is, appear the first serious efforts, among English prose writers, to attain a better mode of expression. The results which followed the absence of a standard written language at home were strengthened by the general acquaintance with foreign literature.
But throughout the middle ages this common focus on style had led to undue consideration of style as ornament. In the renaissance this same tendency appears in Guevara, for instance, and in Lyly. The Euphuistic style, as Morris Croll has pointed out, is more largely than was formerly supposed to be the case, derived from mediaeval rhetoric.
What they could have found in the doctrines of most modern political economists which should lead them to suppose that human life would be precious in their eyes, is unknown to the writer of these pages. Those whose bugbear has been over- population, whose motto has been an euphuistic version of The more the merrier; but the fewer the better fare
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