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Updated: July 20, 2025
The most successful artist in hopping could hardly expect applause from the right-minded. He would excite attention because he was able to hop so far, and not because he was the exponent of a praiseworthy method of locomotion. Lyly gained eminence by doing to a greater extent than any man a thing that was not worth doing at all.
They quarrel violently, and Euphues becomes so irritated that he must needs go and rent new lodgings, 'which by good friends he quickly got, and there fell to his Pater noster, where awhile, says Lyly innocently, 'I will not trouble him in his prayers. They are reconciled later, and Philautus obtains permission to love; but he has discovered in the mean time that the lady will not have him.
John Lyly said, 'There is nothing more swifter than time, nothing more sweeter, and countless Elizabethan gentlemen and ladies underscored that sentence, or transferred it to their commonplace books, if they had such painful aids to culture, and were comforted and edified by the discovery that brilliant John Lyly had made.
Lyly wrote other things; his comedies may have taught Shakespeare the trick of Love's Labour Lost; he attempted a sequel of his most famous work with better success than commonly attends sequels, but for us and for his own generation he is the author of one book. Everybody read it, everybody copied it.
The Masques, moreover, of Jonson, of Lyly, of Fletcher, and of Chapman are exact reproductions upon the English court theatres of such festival pageants as were presented to the Medici at Florence or to the Este family at Ferrara.
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."
To show you how many dramatists arose in this great acting age I will give you a list of the greatest, all of whom were born between 1552 and 1585. After Nicholas Udall and Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, the writers of our first comedy and first tragedy, there came: George Peel. Francis Beaumont. John Lyly. John Fletcher. Thomas Kyd. John Webster. Robert Greene. Philip Massinger.
Expressions that are surprisingly modern turn up now and then. One American street urchin taunts another by telling him that he doesn't know enough to come in when it rains. The saying is at least three hundred years old, for Lyly says, in a dyspeptic moment, 'So much wit is sufficient for a woman as when she is in the rain can warn her to come out of it.
And then Sir Launcelot with such knights as he had, and men of war to the number of ten thousand, put them in array, and met with them and fought with them manly, and slew and detrenched many of the Romans, and slew many knights and admirals of the party of the Romans and Saracens; there was slain the king of Lyly and three great lords, Aladuke, Herawd, and Heringdale.
Think of the French, who had once had a Villon, intoxicating themselves with somnolent draughts of Richardson. But, then, the French could match the paste euphuisms of Lyly with the novels of Scudery. Every modern literature has been subject to these epidemics and diseases. It is needless to dwell upon them in detail.
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