ly's manner in Melbancke's "Philotimus,"[107] 1583, a
book full, as "Euphues," of letters, dialogues, and philosophical
discussions, and in Warner's "Pan his Syrinx," 1584. Warner, whose fame
mainly rests on his long poem, "Albion's England," published in 1586,
began his literary career as a novelist of the euphuistic school. In
common with many youths of all times, of whom Lyly was one, he was
scarcely out of "non-age," to use his own word, than he wanted to impart
to his fellow-men his experience of a life, for him just begun, and to
teach them how to behave in a world of which he knew only the outside.
He lands his hero, Sorares, "in a sterile and harborlesse island," not a
rare occurrence even in novels anterior to Defoe; Sorares' sons start to
find him. Both they and their father meet with sundry adventures, in the
course of which they tell or hear stories and take part in various
"controversies and complayntes." Many topics are philosophically
discussed; the chief being, as in Lyly, woman. One of the speakers puts
forward the assertion that there may be, after all, some good in women;
but another demonstrates that there is none at all; and that their name
of "wo-man" contains their truest definition. Whereupon, we are treated
once more to a description of dresses and fashions: "Her face painted,
her beautie borrowed, her haire an others, and that frisled, her
gestures enforced, her lookes premeditated, her backe bolstred, her
breast bumbasted, her shoulders bared and her middle straite laced, and
then is she in fashion!" Of course this does not apply to English, but
to Scythian and Assyrian ladies. This description is followed, as in
Lyly, by a proper antidote, and with a number of rules to be observed by
all the honest people who desire to escape the wiles of the feminine
sex.

Warner's book had some success; it reached a second edition in
1597,[108] in which the author states that two writers, at least, copied
him, sometimes "verbatim" without any acknowledgment; one of them seems
to have been no less a person than Robert Greene, "a scholler," says
Warner, "better than my selfe on whose grave the grasse now groweth
green, whom otherwise, though otherwise to me guiltie, I name not."
Several incidents in Greene's works resemble Warner's stories,
especially the one called "Opheltes," the plot of which forcibly reminds
us of "Francesco's Fortunes," and at the same time of a different work
of greater fame, the "Two G