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Elizabethan euphuism must be looked for in a sunny land by the 
shore of the tideless sea. The hero of the romance of Kuphues 
corresponded in perfectness of body and readiness of wit to the 
quality called ‘euphues,” by Plato. The source whence 
affected writing in England was immediately derived, was not 
Greece but Italy. The intellectual lead among nations passes 
from one to another. In the 16th century Italian influence was 
predominant in Europe. It was not without good reason that 
the tutor of Edward VI. cried shame against ‘‘ the enchantments 
of Circe, brought out of Italy to mar men’s manners in 
’ England.” Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Howard, Earl of Surrey, 
(who rank among our earliest sonneteers), had travelled in Italy, 
and having there ‘tasted the sweet and stately measures and © 
style of the Italian poesie, greatly polished our English rude and 
homely manner of vulgar poesie from that it had beer before,” 
(Puttenham). In that age the very tailors and shoemakers of 
Italy stitched rhymes and cobbled verse. . Unwittingly Petrarch 
became a father of conceits. That period proved to be the 
prelude to the decadence of the literature of the land of the song. 
The record of Greek and of Latin literature was reproduced. 
Happily in England the event proved far otherwise. ‘The fame 
of Lyly and Robert Greene, the apostles of euphuism was over- 
shadowed by that of their illustrious contemporaries—Jonson, 
Raleigh, Sidney, Spenser, Bacon, and Shakespeare. History 
was reversed. ‘The age of euphuism in England proved one of 
the most glorious and important eras in the progress of the 
human mind. Strange juxtaposition—the straining after effect, 
the affectation and laboured pomposity of Lyly and the minor 
euphuists, side by side with the clever aphorisms, the deep 
discoveries and profound propositions of the prince of philo- 
sophers, and the sound common sense, keen insight into human 
nature, and terse periods of the prince of poets. So in our age 
the sublime and the ridiculous are strangely blended. We have 
numberless authors, reams of frivolous fiction, scores of writers 
of verses of society tricky in style, ephemeral in character—in 
the same period which has given to the world a Browning and a 
Tennyson. The fame of the lost Laureate shall shine more and 
more as the ages roll on, while the trashy novelists and trifling 
poetasters will sink into obscurity. Some day J. K. Stephen’s 
lines will be verified, and there shall 
‘‘stand a muzzled stripling 
‘* Mute, beside a muzzled bore; 
“When the Rudyards cease from Kipling, 
“And the Haggards Ride no more.” 
Lyly’s second book, “ Euphues and his England,” was 
published in 1580. The title page quaintly says that the book 
is “delightful to be read, and nothing hurtful to be regarded, 
