ure, English History in the
new shape which we have noted began in the work of the poet Daniel. The
chronicles of Stowe and Speed, who preceded him, are simple records of
the past, often copied almost literally from the annals they used, and
utterly without style or arrangement; while Daniel, inaccurate and
superficial as he is, gave his story a literary form and embodied it in
a pure and graceful prose. Two larger works at the close of Elizabeth's
reign, the "History of the Turks" by Knolles, and Raleigh's vast but
unfinished plan of the "History of the World," showed a widening of
historic interest beyond the merely national bounds to which it had
hitherto been confined.

[Sidenote: Euphuism.]

A far higher developement of our literature sprang from the growing
influence which Italy was exerting, partly through travel and partly
through its poetry and romances, on the manners and taste of the time.
Men made more account of a story of Boccaccio's, it was said, than of a
story from the Bible. The dress, the speech, the manners of Italy became
objects of almost passionate imitation, and of an imitation not always
of the wisest or noblest kind. To Ascham it seemed like "the enchantment
of Circe brought out of Italy to mar men's manners in England." "An
Italianate Englishman," ran the harder proverb of Italy itself, "is an
incarnate devil." The literary form which this imitation took seemed at
any rate ridiculous. John Lyly, distinguished both as a dramatist and a
poet, laid aside the tradition of English style for a style modelled on
the decadence of Italian prose. Euphuism, as the new fashion has been
named from the prose romance of Euphues which Lyly published in 1579, is
best known to modern readers by the pitiless caricature in which
Shakspere quizzed its pedantry, its affectation, the meaningless
monotony of its far-fetched phrases, the absurdity of its extravagant
conceits. Its representative, Armado in "Love's Labour's Lost," is "a
man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight," "that hath a mint of
phrases in his brain; one whom the music of his own vain tongue doth
ravish like enchanting harmony." But its very extravagance sprang from
the general burst of delight in the new resources of thought and
language which literature felt to be at its disposal; and the new sense
of literary beauty which it disclosed in its affectation, in its love of
a "mint of phrases," and the "music of its own vain tongue," the new
sens