Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/120

Rh 104 and dull as they would be to a modern audience, were charged with interest to those courtly hearers who saw in Midas Philip II., Elizabeth in Cynthia, and perhaps Leicester s unwelcome marriage with Lady Sheffield in the love affair between Endymion and Tellus which brings the former under Cynthia s displeasure. As a matter of fact his reputation and popularity as a play-writer were consider able. Gabriel Harvey dreaded lest Lyly should make a play upon their quarrel ; Meres, as is well known, places him among &quot; the best for comedy ; &quot; and Ben Jonson names him among those foremost rivals who were &quot; outshone &quot; and outsung by Shakespeare. Euphues. It was not, however, as a dramatist, but as the author of Euphues, that Lyly made most mark upon the Elizabethan world. His plays amused the court circle, but the &quot; new English &quot; of his novel threatened to permanently change the course of English style. The plot of Euphues is extremely simple. The hero, whose name may very possibly have been suggested by a passage in Ascham s School master, is introduced to us as still in bondage to the follies of youth, &quot; preferring fancy before friends, and this present humour before honour to come.&quot; His travels bring him to Naples, where he falls in love with Lucilla, the governor s light-minded daughter. Lucilla is already pledged to Euphues s friend Philautus, but Euphues s passion betrays his friendship, and the old lover finds himself thrown over by both friend and mistress. Euphues himself, however, is very soon forsaken for a more attractive suitor. He and Philautus make up their quarrel, and Euphues writes his friend &quot;a cooling card,&quot; to be &quot; applied to all lovers,&quot; which is so severe upon the fair sex that Lyly feels it necessary to balance it by a sort of apology addressed &quot;to the grave matrons and honest maidens of Italy.&quot; Euphues then leaves Naples for his native Athens, where he gives himself up to study, of which the first fruits are two long treatises the first, &quot;Euphues and his Ephcebus,&quot; a disquisition on the art of education addressed to parents, and the second, &quot; Euphues and Atheos,&quot; a discussion of the first principles of religion. The remainder of the book is filled up with correspondence between Euphues and his friends. We have letters from Euphues to Phil autus on the death of Lucilla, to another friend on the death of his daughter, to one Botonio &quot;to take his exile patiently,&quot; and to the youth Alcius, remonstrating with him on his bad behaviour at the university. Finally a pair of letters, the first from Livia &quot; at the emperour s court to Euphues at Athens,&quot; answered by &quot;Euphues to Livia,&quot; wind up the first part, and announce to us Euphues s intention of visiting England. An address from Lyly to Lord Delawarr is affixed, to which was added in the second edition &quot;An Address to the Gentlemen Scholars of England.&quot; Euphues and his England is rather longer than the first part. Euphues and Philautus travel from Naples to England. They arrive at Dover, halt for the night at Fidus s house at Canterbury, and then proceed to London, where they make acquaintance with Surius, a young English gentleman of great birth and noble blood ; Psellus, an Italian nobleman reputed &quot;great inmagick&quot;; Martins, an elderly Englishman; Camilla, a beautiful English girl of insignificant family ; Lady Flavia and her niece Fraunces. After endless corre spondence and conversation on all kinds of topics, Euphues is recalled to Athens, and from there corresponds with his friends. &quot;Euphues Glasse for Europe&quot; is a flattering description of Eng land sent to Livia at Naples. It is the most interesting portion of the book, and throws light upon one or two points of Lyly s own biography. The author naturally seized the opportunity for paying his inevitable tribute to the queen, and pays it in his most exalted style. &quot;0 fortunate England that hath such a queene, ungratefull if thou praye not for hir, wicked if thou do not love hir, miserable if thou lose hir ! &quot; and so on. The book ends with Philautus s announcement of his marriage to Fraunces, upon which Euphues sends characteristic congratulations and retires, &quot; tormented in body and grieved in mind,&quot; to the Mount of Silexedra, &quot; where I leave him to his musing or Muses.&quot; Such is a brief outline of the book which for a time set the fashion for English prose. Two editions of each part appeared within the first year after publication, and thirteen editions of both are enumerated by Mr Arber up to 1636, after which, with the exception of a modernized version in 1718, Euphues was never reprinted until 1868, when Mr Arber took it in hand. The reasons for its popularity are not far to seek. As far as matter was con cerned it fell in with all the prevailing literary fashions. Its long disquisitions on love, religion, exile, women, or education, on court life and country pleasures, handled all the most favourite topics in the secularized speculation of the time ; its foreign background and travel talk pleased a society of which Lyly himself said &quot; trafic and travel hath woven the nature of all nations into ours and made this land like arras full of device which was broadcloth full of workman ship ; &quot; and, although Lyly steered clear in it of the worst classical pedantries of the day, the book was more than sufficiently steeped in classical learning, and based upon classical material, to attract a literary circle which was nothing if not humanist. A large pro portion of its matter indeed was drawn from classical sources. The general tone of sententious moralizing may be traced to Plutarch, from whom the treatise on education, &quot;Euphues and his Ephcebus,&quot; and that on exile, &quot; Letter to Botonio to take his exile patiently,&quot; are literally translated, as well as a number of other shorter passages either taken direct from the Latin versions or from some of the numerous English translations of Plutarch then current. The in numerable illustrations based upon a kind of pseudo natural history are largely taken from Pliny, while the mythology is that of Virgil and Ovid. It was not the matter of Eupliucs, however, so much as the style which made it famous. The sources of Lyly s peculiar style have only recently been satisfactorily traced by a German scholar, Dr Landmann, whose interesting and well arranged pamphlet we need do little more than summarize (Landmann, Der Euphuismus, sein IVcsen, seine Quelle, seine Gcschichlc, &e., Giessen, 1881). What, asks Dr Landmann, is Euphuism, properly so called ? The term till now has been generally used as if it included all the affected modes of speaking and writing in vogue in England during the 16th century. It lias even been made to cover all the corrup tion of English taste from Surrey to Dryden ; and the common mode of explaining it has been to say that it was a mere &quot; exagger ation of the Italianating taste which had begun with the revival of our poetical literature&quot; under Henry VIII. In reality, however, Euphues has very little to do with the other affectations of the time. Its chief characteristics, to quote Dr Landmann, are &quot; a peculiar combination of antithesis with alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and play upon words, a love for the conformity and correspondence of parallel sentences, and a tendency to accumulate rhetorical figures, such as climax, the rhetorical question, objections and refutations, the repetition of the same thought in other forms, &e.&quot; To this may be added constant references to antiquity and a great fondness for comparisons drawn from a sort of fabulous natural history. On the other hand the style is free from what Puttenham calls &quot;mingle mangle,&quot; that is to say, from the pedantic and indiscri minate use of foreign or Latinized words, and also from the hyper bolical extravagances of the Petrarchians. Lyly s peculiarities are those of syntax and construction rather than of phraseology. Compared to that of the Surrey school, his diction is simple and direct, and he himself declares that he does not pretend to please those &quot; Englishmen who desire to heare finer speech than the lan guage will allowe,&quot; that is to say, the lovers of the Italianate circumlocutions which ruled English poetry from Surrey to Spenser. His work then is not simply to be regarded as the outcome of the classical and Italian influence at work in England since the begin ning of the century. It has individual features which have to be accounted for, and which have now been traced with certainty by Dr Landmann to the influence of one foreign author Don Antonio de GUEVABA (q.v. ). Guevara s chief work was El Libra Aureo dc Marco Aurelio (1529), a sort of historical romance based upon Plutarch and upon Marcus Aurelius s Meditations, the object of which was to produce a &quot; mirror for princes,&quot; of the kind so popular throughout the Kenaissance. Within the year of its publication Guevara issued an enlarged edition of his book, calling it Libra del Empcrador Marco Aurelio con rclox de Principcs ; and a number of fresh editions and of translations into almost every European lan guage followed. The book became almost immediately popular in England. The first edition, or rather a French version of it, was translated into English by Lord Berners in 1531, and published in 1534. Before 1560 twelve editions of Lord Berners s translation had been printed, and before 1578 six different translators of this and later works of Guevara had appeared. The translation, however, which had most influence upon English literature was that by North, the well-known translator of Plutarch, in 1568, called The Dial for Princes, Compiled ly the Reverend Father in God Don Antony of Guevara, Byshop of Guadix, Ac., Englished out of the Frcnche ly Th. North. It was from this book, and from certain other translations from Guevara, of which a full account will be found in Dr Land- mann s pamphlet, that Lyly borrowed his peculiar style, and even a certain small proportion of his material. The sententious and anti thetical style of the Dial for Princes is substantially that of Euphues, though Guevara on the whole handles it better than his imitator, and lias many passages of real force and dignity. The general plan of the two books is also much the same. In both the biography is merely a peg on which to hang moral disquisitions and treatises. The use made of letters is the same in both. Even the names of some of the characters are similar. Thus Guevara s Lucilla is the flighty daughter of Marcus Aurelius. Lyly s Lucilla is the flighty daughter of Ferardo, governor of Naples ; Guevara s Livia is a lady at the court of Marcus Aurelius, Lyly s Livia is a lady at the court &quot; of the emperor,&quot; of whom no further description is given. The 9th. 10th, llth, and 12th chapters of the Dial for Princes sug gested the discussion between Euphues and Atheos. The letter from Euphues to Alcius is substantially the same in subject and treatment as that from Marcus Aurelius to his nephew Epesipo. Both Guevara and Lyly translated Plutarch s vork DC Educationc Libcronun, Lyly, however, keeping closer than the Spanish author to the original. The use made by Lyly of the university of Athens was an anachronism in a novel intended to describe his own time. He 1 orrowed it, however, from Guevara, in whose book a university