Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/119

Rh L Y L L Y L 103 was alone needed to ensure its continued influence and the per manent celebrity of its author. Besides his books, Lyell contributed seventy-six geological papers to various societies. The only authorities yet published for his life are Life and Letters of Sir Charles Lyetl, 1881, edited by Mrs Lyell, and the obituary notices in 1875 at the Royal ami other Societies. (A. B. B.) LYLY, or LILLY, or LYLIE, JOHN (1553-1606), the famous author of Euphues, was born in Kent in 1553 or 1554. At the age of sixteen, according to Wood, he became a student of Magdalen College, Oxford, where in due time he proceeded to his bachelor s and master s degrees (1573 and 1575), and from whence we find him in 1574 applying to Lord Burghley &quot; for the queen s letters to Magdalen College to admit him fellow.&quot; The fellow ship, however, was not granted, and Lyly shortly after left the university. He complains of what seems to have been a sentence of rustication passed upon him at some period in his academical career, in his address to the gentlemen scholars of Oxford affixed to the second edition of the first part of Euphues, but in the absence of any further evidence it is impossible to fix either its date or its cause. If we are to believe Wood, he never took kindly to the proper studies of the university. &quot; For so it was that his genius being naturally bent to the pleasant paths of poetry (as if Apollo had given to him a wreath of his own bays without snatching or struggling) did in a manner neglect academical studies, yet not so much but that he took the degrees in arts, that of master being compleated 1575.&quot; After he left Oxford, where he had already the reputation of &quot; a noted wit,&quot; Lyly seems to have attached himself to Lord Burghley. &quot;This noble man,&quot; he writes in the &quot; Glasse for Europe,&quot; in the second part of Euphues (1580), &quot; I found so ready being but a straunger to do me good, that neyther I ought to forget him, neyther cease to pray for him, that as he hath the wisdom of Nestor, so he may have the age, that having the policies of Ulysses he may have his honor, worthy to lyve long, by whom so many lyve in quiet, and not unworthy to be advaunced by whose care so many have been preferred.&quot; Two years later we possess a letter of Lyly to the treasurer, dated July 1582, in which the writer protests againstsome undefined accusation which had brought him into trouble with his patron, and demands a personal interview for the purpose of clearing his character. What the further relations between them were we have no means of knowing, but it is clear that neither from Burghley nor from the queen did Lyly ever receive any substantial patronage. In 1578 he began his literary career by the composition of Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit, which was licensed to Gabriel Cawood on December 2, 1578, and published in the spring of 1579. In the same year the author was incorporated M.A. at Cambridge, and possibly saw his hopes of court advancement dashed by the appoint ment in July of Edmund Tylney to the office of master of the revels, a post at which, as he reminds the queen some years later, he had all along been encouraged to &quot; aim his courses.&quot; Euphues and his England appeared in 1580, and, like the first part of the book, won immediate popularity. For a time Lyly was the most successful and fashionable of English writers. He was hailed as the author of &quot; a new English,&quot; as a &quot;raffineur de FAnglois;&quot; and, as Edmund Blount, the editor of his plays, tells us in 1632, &quot;that beautie in court which could not parley Euphuism was as little regarded as she which nowe there speakes not French.&quot; After the publication of Euphues, however, Lyly seems to have entirely deserted the novel form himself, which passed into the hands of his imitators, and to have thrown himself almost exclusively into play-writing, probably with a view to the mastership of revels whenever a vacancy should occur. Eight plays by him were probably acted before the queen by the children of the Chapel Royal and the children of St Paul s between the years 1584 and 1589, one or two of them being repeated before a popular audience at the Blackfriars Theatre. Their brisk lively dialogue, classical colour, and frequent allusions to persons and events of the day maintained that popularity with the court which Euphues had won. In 1589 Lyly published a tract in the Martin Marprelate controversy, called Fappe with an hatchet, alias a figge for my Godsonne ; Or Crack me this nut ; Or a Countrie Cuffe, &c. 1 About the same time we may probably date his first petition to Queen Elizabeth. The two petitions, transcripts of which are extant among the Harleian MSS., are undated, but in the first of them he speaks of having been ten years hanging about the court in hope of preferment, and in the second he extends the period to thirteen years. It may be con jectured with great probability that the ten years date from 1579, when Edmund Tylney was appointed master of the revels with a tacit understanding that Lyly was to have the next reversion of the post. &quot; I was entertained your Majestie s servaunt by your own gratious favor,&quot; he says, &quot;strengthened with condicions that I should ayme all my courses at the Revells (I dare not say with a promise, but with a hopeful Item to the Revercion) for which these ten yeres I have attended with an unwearyed patience.&quot; But in 1589 or 1590 the mastership of the revels was as far off as ever, Tylney in fact held the post for thirty-one years, and that Lyly s petition brought him no compensa tion in other directions may be inferred from the second petition of 1593. &quot;Thirteen yeres your highnes servant but yet nothing. Twenty freinds that though they saye they will be sure, I finde them sure to be slowe. A thousand hopes, but all nothing ; a hundred promises but yet nothing. Thus casting up the inventory of my friends, hopes, promises, and tymes, the svmma totalis amounteth to just nothing.&quot; What may have been Lyly s subsequent fortunes at court we do not know. Edmund Blount says vaguely that Elizabeth &quot; graced and rewarded &quot; him, but of this there is no other evidence. After 1590 his works steadily declined in influence and reputation ; other stars were in possession of the horizon ; and so far as ve know he died poor and neglected in the early part of James I. s reign. He was buried in London at St Bartholomew the Less on Xovember 20, 1606. He was married, and we hear of two sons and a daughter. Comedies. In 1632 Edmund Blount published &quot; Six Court Come dies,&quot; including Endymion, Sappho and Phao, Alexander and Cam- paspe, Midas, Mother BomMe, and Gallatlica. To these should be added the Woman in the Moone (Lyly s earliest play, to judge from a passage in the prologue and therefore earlier than 1584, the date of Alexander and Campaspe), and Love s Meta morphosis, first printed in 1601. Of these, all but the last are in prose. A Warning for Faire Women (1599) and The Maid s Metamor- phosis (1600) have been attributed to Lyly, but on altogether insuffi cient grounds. The first editions of all these plays were issued between 1584 and 1601, and the majority of them between 1584 and 1592, in what were Lyly s most successful and popular years. His importance as a dramatist has been very differently estimated. Prof. Minto denies him any appreciable influence upon our literature, while Professor A. Ward, on the other hand, rightly believes his work to have had a great effect upon the development of dramatic dialogue, and the prose drama in general. Lyly s dialogue is still a long way removed from the dialogue of Shakespeare. But at the same time it is a great advance in rapidity and resource upon any thing which had gone before it ; it represents an important step in English dramatic art. His nimbleness, and the wit which struggles with his pedantry, found their full development in the dialogue of Twelfth Night and Mitch Ado about Nothing, just as &quot;Marlowe s mighty line &quot; led up to and was eclipsed by the majesty and music of Shakespearian passion. One or two of the songs introduced into his plays are justly famous, and show a real lyrical gift. Nor in estimating his dramatic position and his effect upon his time must it be forgotten that his classical and mythological plots, flavourless 1 The evidence for his authorship may be found in Gabriel Harvey s Pierces Supererogation (written November 1589, published 1593), in Nash s Have with you to Saffron Walden (1596), and in various allusions in Lyly s own plays. See Fairholt s Dramatic Works of John Lilly, vol. i. p. 20.