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Updated: June 18, 2025
One is more astonished at Lyly's power of endurance as author than at his own power of endurance as reader. For the volume is actually readable even at this day. Did Lyly not grow wearied of perpetually riding these alliterative trick-ponies? Apparently not. The book is 'executed' with a vivacity, a dash, a 'go, that will captivate any reader who is willing to meet the author halfway.
Besides the fish Scolopidus, the favorite animals of Lyly's menagerie are such as the chameleon, "which though he have most guts draweth least breath;" the bird Piralis, "which sitting upon white cloth is white, upon green, green;" and the serpent Porphirius, "which, though he be full of poison, yet having no teeth, hurteth none but himself."
But it is difficult nevertheless. I might say bluntly that, unless the camera lies, your face is not one to stake against Fame over a game of hazard. You remember John Lyly's "Cupid and my Campaspe"? and how Cupid losing, and so on, with the rest of his charms, one by one?
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."
Its qualities, when we consider the general state of contemporary literature, may well account for the popularity of Lyly's attempt at novel-writing, but the style was radically unsuited for dramatic composition, and the result is for the most part hardly to be tolerated, and can only have met with such court-favour as fell to its lot, owing to the general fashion for which its success in the romance was responsible.
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.
She may keep the keys, but he will control the pocket-book. The model wife in Ecclesiastes had greater privileges; she could not only consider a piece of ground, but she could buy it if she liked it. Not so this well-trained wife of Lyly's novel.
Sidney was our first writer of poetic prose. The poet Drayton says that he did first reduce Our tongue from Lyly's writing, then in use, Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies, Playing with words and idle similes. Sidney was certainly no Euphuist, but his style was as "Italianated" as Lyly's, though in a different way. His English was too pretty for prose.
Lyly's style was pithy and sententious, and his sentences have the air of proverbs or epigrams. The vice of Euphuism was its monotony. On every page of the book there was something pungent, something quotable; but many pages of such writing became tiresome. Yet it did much to form the hitherto loose structure of English prose, by lending it point and polish.
The writings of R. are among the classics of his subject. Novelist, was ed. at Camb., and studied law, from which he drifted into literature. Writer of romances, b. in Essex, saw military service in the Low Countries. He began to write in 1574, and took Lyly's Euphues as his model.
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