which has influenced many writers since and is
familiar to us to-day in the copy of it used by Ruskin in his earlier
works. Lyly and Sidney are worth looking at more closely.

The age was intoxicated with language. It went mad of a mere delight in
words. Its writers were using a new tongue, for English was enriched
beyond all recognition with borrowings from the ancient authors; and
like all artists who become possessed of a new medium, they used it to
excess. The early Elizabethans' use of the new prose was very like the
use that educated Indians make of English to-day. It is not that these
write it incorrectly, but only that they write too richly. And just as
fuller use and knowledge teaches them spareness and economy and gives
their writing simplicity and vigour, so seventeenth century practice
taught Englishmen to write a more direct and undecorated style and gave
us the smooth, simple, and vigorous writing of Dryden--the first really
modern English prose. But the Elizabethans loved gaudier methods; they
liked highly decorative modes of expression, in prose no less than in
verse. The first author to give them these things was John Lyly, whose
book _Euphues_ was for the five or six years following its publication a
fashionable craze that infected all society and gave its name to a
peculiar and highly artificial style of writing that coloured the work
of hosts of obscure and forgotten followers. Lyly wrote other things;
his comedies may have taught Shakespeare the trick of _Love's Labour
Lost_; he attempted a sequel of his most famous work with better success
than commonly attends sequels, but for us and for his own generation he
is the author of one book. Everybody read it, everybody copied it. The
maxims and sentences of advice for gentlemen which it contained were
quoted and admired in the Court, where the author, though he never
attained the lucrative position he hoped for, did what flattery could do
to make a name for himself. The name "Euphuism" became a current
description of an artificial way of using words that overflowed out of
writing into speech and was in the mouths, while the vogue lasted, of
everybody who was anybody in the circle that fluttered round the Queen.

The style of _Euphues_ was parodied by Shakespeare and many attempts
have been made to imitate it since. Most of them are inaccurate--Sir
Walter Scott's wild attempt the most inaccurate of all. They fail
because their authors have imagined that