?" and four or five similes still follow. Tormented by
examples, overwhelmed with similitudes, the adventurous reader, who
to-day risks a reading of "Euphues," feels it impossible to keep his
composure. He would like to protest, to defend himself, to say that he
has lied, this imperturbable naturalist, that bitter kernels are found
indeed in the hardest shells, that painted pots often contain something
other than poison, and that if toads appear less ugly in foul water, it
is perhaps because they are the less seen. But what does it matter to
Lyly? He writes for a select coterie, and when a man writes for a
coterie, the protestations of the discontented, of the envious, alas! of
those of good sense, too, are scarcely of any consequence. Let the
common herd then shriek themselves hoarse at Lyly's door: it is shut
fast, he will hear nothing, and is indifferent even if among this common
herd Shakespeare figures. He is happy; "Euphues," in company with the
little dogs, rumples the silken laps of ladies with the lace-plaited
ruffs.

[Illustration: THE BOA, AS IT WAS UNDERSTOOD, A.D. 1608.]

III.

But however important style may be, it is not everything in a literary
work. It must be acknowledged that Lyly's success, if it is no
commendation of the taste of his contemporaries, is greatly to the
credit of their morality and earnestness. By the form of his sentences
Lyly is a Spaniard; he surpasses the most bombastic, and could give
points to that author mentioned by Louis Racine, who, discovering his
mistress lying under a tree, cried: "Come and see the sun reclining in
the shade!" But the basis of his character is purely English; he is
truly of the same country as Richardson, and belongs at heart to that
race which Tacitus said did not know how "to laugh at vices," a very
high praise that Rousseau rendered later almost in the same terms.[80]
From the time of Lyly until our own day, the English novel, generally
speaking, has remained not only moral, but a moralizing agent; the
author has recourse to a thousand skilful and fascinating devices, and
leads us by the hand through all sorts of flowery paths; but whatever
the manner may be, he almost invariably, without saying so, leads us to
the sermon. There are sermons in Defoe, who strongly protested against
some abbreviations of his "Robinson Crusoe": "They strip it of all
those reflections as well religious as moral, which are not only the
greatest beauties of the work, but