ed also before the Queen
by the same children, on Shrove Tuesday, 1584; his "Endimion, the man in
the moone," played before the Queen "at Greenwich on Candlemass day at
night, by the chyldren of Paules"; "Gallathea," played on New Year's
Day; "Midas," performed on Twelfth Night, also before the Queen, &c.[96]

On love matters and women's affairs, he was considered an authority; the
analysis of the passions and the knowledge of the deeper moods of the
soul, which many consider to be, among novelists, a new-born science,
were regarded by his contemporaries as a thing wholly his, a discovery
made by himself; not foreseeing his successors, they proclaimed him a
master of his newly invented art. Beginners would come to him for advice
or for a preface, as they go now to the heirs of his art, especially
when love is their theme. In this way Thomas Watson published in 1582
his "Passionate Centurie of Love," and prefaced it, as with a
certificate of its worth, by a letter from Lyly: "My good friend, I have
read your new passions, and they have renewed mine old pleasures, the
which brought to me no lesse delight, then they have done to yourself
commendations.... Such is the nature of persuading pleasure, that it
melteth the marrow before it scorch the skin ... not unlike unto the
oyle of jeat which rotteth the bone and never rankleth the flesh."[97]

It was useless for wise minds to grumble; Lyly always found women to
applaud him. In vain did Nash, twelve years after the appearance of
"Euphues," scoff at the enthusiasm with which he had read the book when
he was "a little ape in Cambridge";[98] vainly was Euphuism derided on
the stage before a Cambridge audience: "There is a beaste in India
call'd a polecatt ... and the further she is from you the less you smell
her," a piece of information that contains more probability than perhaps
any given by Lyly.[99] Vainly, too, Shakespeare showed his opinion of
the style in lending it to Falstaff when the worthy knight wishes to
admonish Prince Henry in the manner of courts. Grown old in his tavern,
Falstaff has no idea that these refinements, fashionable at the time
when he was as slender as his page, may be now the jest of the young
generation: "There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of,
and it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch: this pitch, as
ancient writers do report, doth defile; so doth the company thou
keepest: for, Harry, now I do not speak to thee in