ne is not essentially Euphuistic. John
Lyly would be the last man to merit any portion of that fine praise
bestowed by Hazlitt upon Shakespeare when he said that Shakespeare's
genius 'consisted in the faculty of transforming himself at will into
whatever he chose.' Lyly's genius was the opposite of this; it
consisted in the faculty of transforming everybody into a
reduplication of himself. There is no change in style when the
narrative parts end and the dialogue begins. All the persons of the
drama utter one strange tongue. They are no better than the characters
in a Punch and Judy show, where one concealed manipulator furnishes
voice for each of the figures. But in Lyly's novel there is not even
an attempt at the most rudimentary ventriloquism.

What makes the book still less a reflection of life is that the
speakers indulge in interminably long harangues. No man (unless he
were a Coleridge) would be tolerated who talked in society at such
inordinate length. When the characters can't talk to one another they
retire to their chambers and declaim to themselves. They polish their
language with the same care, open the classical dictionary, and have
at themselves in good set terms. Philautus, inflamed with love of
Camilla, goes to his room and pronounces a ten-minute discourse on the
pangs of love, having only himself for auditor. They are amazingly
patient under the verbal inflictions of one another. Euphues, angry
with Philautus for having allowed himself to fall in love, takes him
to task in a single speech containing four thousand words. If Lyly had
set out with the end in view of constructing a story by putting into
it alone 'what is not life,' his product would have been what we find
it now. One could easily believe the whole affair to have been
intended for a tremendous joke were it not that the tone is so
serious. We are accustomed to think of youth as light-hearted: but
look at a serious child,--there is nothing more serious in the world.
Lyly was twenty-six years when he first published. Much of the
seriousness in his romance is the burden of twenty-six years'
experience of life, a burden greater perhaps than he ever afterward
carried.

Being, as we take it, an unmarried man, Lyly gives directions for
managing a wife. He believes in the wholesome doctrine that a man
should select his own wife. 'Made marriages by friends' are dangerous.
'I had as lief another should take measure by his back of my apparel
as appo