turies been accustomed
in the kind, and, to a still greater, loaded with others which do not
appeal to us. To put aside altogether its extraordinary and in a way
epoch-making style, which gives it its main actual place in the history
of English literature, it is further loaded with didactic digressions
which, though certain later novelists have been somewhat peccant in the
kind, have never been quite equalled--no, not in _Rasselas_ itself or
the _Fool of Quality_. But if anybody, who has the necessary knowledge
to understand, and therefore the necessary patience to tolerate, these
knotty knarry envelopes, insertions, and excrescences, will for the
moment pay no attention to them, but merely strip them off, he will find
the carcass of a very tolerable novel left behind. The first plot of
Philautus--Euphues--Lucilla, and the successive jilting of the two
friends for each other and for Curio, is no mean novel-substance. Not
Balzac himself, certainly no one of his successors, need disdain it: and
more than one of them has taken up something like it. The journey from
Naples to London, and the episode of Fidus and Iffida, could have been
worked up, in the good old three-volume days, to a most effective second
volume. And the picture of the court, with the further loves of
Philautus, Camilla, and the "violet" Frances, would supply a third of
themselves even if Euphues were left out, though some livelier
presentation of his character (which Lyly himself was obviously too much
personally interested to make at all clear) would improve the whole
immensely. But it was still too early: the thing was not yet to be done.
Only, I do not know any book in which the possibilities, and even the
outlines, of this thing were indicated and vaguely sketched earlier in
any European language, unless it be the _Lucretia and Euryalus_ of AEneas
Silvius, which is much more confined in its scope.

The fact is that the very confusedness, the many undeveloped sides, of
_Euphues_, make it much more of an ancestor of the modern novel than if
it were more of a piece. The _quicquid agunt homines_ is as much the
province of the novel as of the satire; and there is more than something
of this as it affected Elizabethan times in _Euphues_. Men's interest in
morals, politics, and education; their development of the modern idea of
society; their taste for letters; their conceits and fancies--all these
appear in it.

The _Arcadia_ stands in a different compart