istle is both in style
and matter an epitome of _Euphues_, which had appeared some three years
before.

Many efforts have been made to discover some model for Lyly's oddities.
Spanish and Italian influences have been alleged, and there is a special
theory that Lord Berners's translations have the credit or discredit of the
paternity. The curious similes are certainly found very early in Spanish,
and may be due to an Eastern origin. The habit of overloading the sentence
with elaborate and far-fetched language, especially with similes, may also
have come from the French _rhetoriqueurs_ already mentioned--a school of
pedantic writers (Chastellain, Robertet, Cretin, and some others being the
chief) who flourished during the last half of the fifteenth century and the
first quarter of the sixteenth, while the latest examples of them were
hardly dead when Lyly was born. The desire, very laudably felt all over
Europe, to adorn and exalt the vernacular tongues, so as to make them
vehicles of literature worthy of taking rank with Latin and Greek,
naturally led to these follies, of which euphuism in its proper sense was
only one.

Michael Drayton, in some verse complimentary to Sidney, stigmatises not
much too strongly Lyly's prevailing faults, and attributes to the hero of
Zutphen the purification of England from euphuism. This is hardly critical.
That Sidney--a young man, and a man of fashion at the time when Lyly's
oddities were fashionable--should have to a great extent (for his
resistance is by no means absolute) resisted the temptation to imitate
them, is very creditable. But the influence of _Euphues_ was at least as
strong for many years as the influence of the _Arcadia_ and the _Apology_;
and the chief thing that can be said for Sidney is that he did not wholly
follow Lyly to do evil. Nor is his positive excellence in prose to be
compared for a moment with his positive excellence in poetry. His life is
so universally known that nothing need be said about it beyond reminding
the reader that he was born, as Lyly is supposed to have been, in 1554;
that he was the son of Sir Henry Sidney, afterwards Viceroy of Ireland, and
of Lady Mary, eldest daughter of the luckless Dudley, Duke of
Northumberland; that he was educated at Shrewsbury and Christ Church,
travelled much, acquiring the repute of one of the most accomplished
cavaliers of Europe, loved without success Penelope Devereux ("Stella"),
married Frances Walsingham, and d