is our duty to give it its full meed
of recognition, but we can understand and forgive the ungratefulness of
its contemporaries.

[84] Bond, I. p. 146.

[85] H. Spencer, Essays, II. _Phil. of Style_.

Another cause of the oblivion which so soon overtook the famous
Elizabethan novel, has already been suggested. Euphuism was too
antagonistic to the general current of English prose to be successful.
Lyly and his Oxford clique were attempting a revolution similar to that
undertaken, at the same period, by Ronsard and his _Pleiad_. Lyly failed
in prose, where Ronsard succeeded in poetry, because he endeavoured to
go back upon tradition, while the Frenchman worked strictly within its
limits. The attempt to throw Court dress over the plain homespun of our
English prose might have been attended with success, had our literature
been younger and more easily led astray. As it was, prose in this
country, when euphuism invaded it, could already show seven centuries of
development, and, moreover, development along the broad and national
lines of common or vulgar speech. Euphuism was after all only part of
the general tendency of the age to focus everything that was good in
politics, religion, and art, on the person and immediate surroundings of
the sovereign; and the history of the eighteenth century, which saw the
last issue of the series of _Euphues_ reprints, is the history of the
collapse of this centralization all along the line, ending in the
complete vindication of the democratic basis of English life and
literature.

With these general remarks we must leave the subject of euphuism. No
history of its origin and its influence can be completely satisfactory:
such questions must of necessity receive a speculative and tentative
solution, for it is impossible to give them an exact answer which admits
of no dispute. The age of Lyly was far more complex than ours, with all
our artistic sects and schisms; the currents of literary influence were
multitudinous and extremely involved. As Symonds wrote, "The romantic
art of the modern world did not spring like that of Greece from an
ungarnered field of flowers. Troubled by reminiscences from the past and
by reciprocal influences from one another, the literatures of modern
Europe came into existence with composite dialects and obeyed confused
canons of taste, exhibited their adolescent vigour with affected graces
and showed themselves senile in their cradles." In the field of
lite