was spoiled, petted, and caressed by the ladies; with an
impartial heart they extended to the author the same favour they granted
to the book, and to their little dogs. He was proclaimed king of letters
by his admirers, and became, in fact, king of the _precieux_. He created
a school, and the name of his hero served to baptize a whole literature.
This particular form of bad style was called _euphuism_.

II.

Euphuism owes to him its name and its diffusion in England; but not,
although it is usually so stated, its birth. This strange language, as
Dr. Landmann[69] has well demonstrated, was imported from Spain into
England, and Lyly was not the first to use it in this country. The works
of Guevara, turned into English by five or six different translators,
had a considerable vogue and acclimatized this extraordinary style in
Great Britain. One of his writings especially, "The golden boke of
Marcus Aurelius, emperour," enjoyed a very great popularity; it was
translated by Lord Berners in 1532, and by Sir Thomas North in 1557,[70]
and went through many editions. The moral dissertations of which it is
full enchanted serious minds; the unusual language of Spain delighted
frivolous souls. Before Lyly, English authors had already imitated it;
but when Lyly appeared and embellished it even more, enthusiasm ran so
high that its foreign progenitor was forgotten, and this exotic style
was rebaptized as proof of adoption and naturalization in England.

Since it is not a natural product, but the mere result of ingenious
artifices, nothing is easier than to reduce it to its component parts,
to take it to pieces so to speak. It consists in an immoderate,
prodigious, monstrous use of similes, so arranged as to set up
antitheses in every limb of the sentence. What is peculiar to the
English imitators, is the employment of alliteration, in order to better
mark the balance of the sentences written for effect. Finally, the kind
of similes even has something peculiar: they are for the most part
borrowed from an imaginary ancient history and a fantastical natural
history, a sort of mythology of plants and stones to which the most
extraordinary virtues are attributed.

In the important parts, when he means to use a noble style, Lyly cannot
relate the most trivial incident without setting up parallels between
the sentiments of his characters and the virtues of toads, serpents,
unicorns, scorpions, and all the fantastical animals mentioned