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But Lyly slips smoothly over the crisis of the action and, in place of passionate scenes, gives us clever discourses and soliloquies, or, at best, a light interchange of question and answer, full of conceits, repartees, and double meanings. For example: "Apel. Whom do you love best in the world?" "Camp. He that made me last in the world." "Apel. That was God." "Camp.
Thus rhetoric is considered merely as style; and the implication seems to be that the poets who would improve their style might well imitate Lyly. Webbe evidently means what he says in identifying poetry and rhetoric in style.
It is full of the glittering conceits and the fluent rhetoric which the ready talent of Lyly had just brought into currency. It is euphuism of the purest water, with all the merits and all the drawbacks of the euphuistic manner. For that very reason the blow was felt the more keenly. A war of pamphlets followed, conducted with the usual fury of literary men.
Lyly drew examples, anecdotes, and fables which he used as Gascoigne suggested, not only from Heywood, but from the Similia and Adagia, of Erasmus, and from the Emblems of Alciati. So far the moral example is counseled or practised only as a recognized device of rhetoric. It is not transferred to poetic until George Whetstone's Dedication to his Promos and Cassandra.
Indeed a good part of that very remarkable pamphlet-literature of this time, which has perhaps scarcely yet received its due share of attention, takes the letter-form: but is mostly even farther from genuine letter-writing than the correspondence of "Immerito" and "Master G. H." We have of course more of Harvey's; we have laments from others, such as Lyly and Googe, about their disappointments as courtiers; we have a good deal of State correspondence.
There follows a dissertation on the affected styles of Guevara and Gongora, of the Pleiade in France, and generally of the artificial manner in Europe, till in England we reach Lyly, "in whose comedies," says Dr.
Ben Jonson, and all the more or less well-taught University wits, as far as I remember, like Greene, Marlowe, and Lyly, do not show much acquaintance with Euripides, AEschylus, Sophocles, and do not often remind us of these masters.
Italian works were translated and circulated in great numbers in England, and among these the most popular were the gay and amorous productions of the story tellers. Born in Kent in 1554, John Lyly studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and received the degree of Master of Arts.
A large measure of the success that Euphues had is due to the commonplaceness of its observations. It abounds in proverbs and copy-book wisdom. In this respect it is as homely as an almanac. John Lyly had a great store of 'miscellany thoughts, and he cheerfully parted with them. His book succeeded as Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy and Watts' On the Mind succeeded.
Play of Noah's Flood, in Manly's Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean Drama, or in Pollard's English Miracle Plays, Moralities and Interludes, or in Belles Lettres Series, sec. 2; L.T. Smith's The York Miracle Plays. Lyly. Endymion, in Holt's English Readings. Marlowe.
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