nning of the 16th century, that is before the
new learning had become a power in the land, though it had not yet been
employed for artistic purposes, was already an important part of our
literature, and possessed a quality which no national prose had
exhibited since the days of Greece, the quality of popularity[76]. This
popularity, which arose from the fact that French and Latin had for so
long been the language of the ruling section of the community, is still
the distinction which marks off our prose from that of other nations. In
Italy, for example, the language of literature is practically
incomprehensible to the dwellers on the soil. But what English prose has
gained in breadth and comprehension by representing the tongue of the
people, it has lost in subtlety. French prose, which developed from the
speech of the Court, is a delicate instrument, capable of expressing the
finest shades of meaning, while the styles of George Meredith and of
Henry James show how difficult it is for a subtle intellect to move
freely within the limitations of English prose. Indeed, "it is a
remarkable fact," as Sainte Beuve noticed, "and an inversion of what is
true of other languages that, in French, prose has always had the
precedence over poetry." Repeated attempts, however, have been made to
capture our language, and to transport it into aristocratic atmospheres;
and of these attempts the first is associated with the name of Lyly.

[76] Cf. Earle, pp. 422, 423.

We have seen that English euphuism was at first a flower of unconscious
growth sprung from the soil of humanism. But ultimately, in the hands of
Pettie, Gosson, Lyly, and Watson, it became the instrument of an Oxford
coterie deliberately and consciously employed for the purpose of
altering the form of English prose. These men did not despise their
native tongue; they used the purest English, carefully avoiding the
favourite "ink-horn terms" of their contemporaries: they admired it, as
one admires a wild bird of the fields, which one wishes to capture in
order to make it hop and sing in a golden cage. The humanists were
already developing a learned style within the native language; Lyly and
his friends utilized this learned style for the creation of an
aristocratic type. Euphuism was no "transient phase of madness[77]," as
Mr Earle contemptuously calls it, but a brave attempt, and withal a
first attempt, to assert that prose writing is an art no less than the
writing of po