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'Let all the keys hang at her girdle, but the purse at thine, so shalt thou know what thou dost spend, and how she can spare. But in setting forth his theory for being happy though married, Lyly, methinks, preaches a dangerous doctrine in this respect: he hints at the possibility of a man's wanting, in vulgar parlance, to go on a spree, expresses no question as to the propriety of his so doing, but says that if a man does let himself loose in this fashion his wife must not know it.
We learn what could not have been new even in 1579, that 'in misery it is a great comfort to have a companion; that 'a new broom sweepeth clean; that 'delays breed dangers; that 'nothing is so perilous as procrastination; that 'a burnt child dreadeth the fire; that it is well not to make comparisons 'lest comparisons should seem odious; that 'it is too late to shut the stable door when the steed is stolen; that 'many things fall between the cup and the lip; and that 'marriages are made in heaven, though consummated on earth. With these old friends come others, not altogether familiar of countenance, and quaintly archaic in their dress: 'It must be a wily mouse that shall breed in the cat's ear; 'It is a mad hare that will be caught with a tabor, and a foolish bird that stayeth the laying salt on her tail, and a blind goose that cometh to the fox's sermon. Lyly would sometimes translate a proverb; he does not tell us that fine words butter no parsnips, but says, 'Fair words fat few, which is delightfully alliterative, but hardly to be accounted an improvement.
And, indeed, there are hints of it in Elizabethan criticism of such early attempts as those of Lyly, Nast, Lodge and others. Moreover, the student of criticism as it deals with the Novel must also expect to meet with a later confusion of nomenclature; the word being loosely applied to any type of prose fiction in contrast with the short story or tale.
It has never wholly recovered from the euphuism to use the word in its widest sense of the late sixteenth century. The influence of John Lyly and his tribe is still traceable, despite a hundred metamorphoses, in some of the plays of to-day and in many of the plays of yesterday.
These are now, however, clearly perceived to be the work of a much riper pen, that, namely, of Lyly. It is probable that the four anonymous and privately printed tracts, which Dr. Grosart has finally selected, do represent Nash's share in the Marprelate Controversy, although in one of them, "Martin's Month's Mind," I cannot say that I recognize his manner.
About contemporary with the Arraignment of Paris are the earliest plays of John Lyly, the Euphuist. Most of these are of a mythological character, while three come more particularly under our notice on account of their pastoral tendency, namely, Gallathea, Love's Metamorphosis, and the Woman in the Moon .
He appears to have turned to this new field of effort when his original one was closed to him for the time. Less under the influence of Lyly and other preceding writers than Greene, he is more natural, simple, and direct, and writes of middle-class citizens and tradesmen with a light and pleasant humour.
This particular form of writing perhaps influenced those who copied Lyly more than anything else in his book. It is a fashion of the more artificial kind of Elizabethan writing in all schools to employ a wealth of classical allusion.
Euphuism, as the new fashion has been named from the prose romance of Euphues which Lyly published in 1579, is best known to modern readers by the pitiless caricature in which Shakspere quizzed its pedantry, its affectation, the meaningless monotony of its far-fetched phrases, the absurdity of its extravagant conceits.
The literary affectation called euphuism was directly based on the precepts of the handbooks on rhetoric; its author, John Lyly, only elaborated and made more precise tricks of phrase and writing, which had been used as exercises in the schools of his youth.
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