Kindly Ascham who had personally visited Italy, had come back as much horrified with the sights he had seen as Luther had been when he returned from Rome. Of the masterpieces of art, of madonnas and palaces he has little to say; but he has much to note concerning the loose morals of the inhabitants. He beseeches his compatriots not to continue to visit this dangerous country: they will meet "Circe" there, and will certainly greatly enjoy themselves; but, behold, they will come back to their native land with an ass's head and a swine's belly. In Italy, according to his experience, a man may sin to his heart's content and no one will in any way interfere. He is free to do so, "as it is free in the citie of London to chose without all blame, whether a man lust to weare shoo or pantocle." Yet he speaks of what he has seen with his own eyes: "I was once in Italie my selfe; but I thanke God my abode there was but ix dayes. And yet I sawe in that little tyme in one citie more libertie to sinne than ever I heard tell of in our noble citie of London in ix yeare ... The lord maior of London, being but a civill officer, is commonlie for his tyme more diligent in punishing sinne ... than all the bloodie inquisitors in Italie be in seaven yeare."

When Englishmen come back from Italy they are full of smiles; they have a ready wit, and delight in vain talk. They give up all idea of getting married; love and no marriage is their only wish; they arrange assignations; they behave most improperly. "They be the greatest makers of love, the daylie daliers, with such pleasant wordes, with such smilyng & secret countenances, with such signes, tokens, wagers, purposed to be lost before they were purposed to be made, with bargaines of wearing colours, floures & herbes, to breede occasion of often meeting of him & her & bolder talking of this & that, &c."[31]

According to some, travelling increased, in a certain number of Englishmen, the tendency we have already noticed, to feel contempt towards their mother tongue. There are persons, wrote George Pettie in 1581, "who will set light by my labours, because I write in English: and those are some nice travailours who retourne home with such queasie stomachs that nothing will downe with them but French, Italian or Spanish ... They count [our tongue] barren: they count it barbarous: they count it unworthy to be accounted of." The more reason, thinks Pettie, to try to polish it; if it is barren it can be enriched by borrowing from other languages, especially the Latin: "It is indeed the readie waie to inrich our tongue and make it copious; and it is the waie which all tongues have taken to inrich themselves."[32] Pettie, as we see, wished Du Bellay's advice to be followed, and Rome to be "plundered."

But Ascham's pleading, though many others spoke to the same effect,[33] had very little result. Learned and well informed as he was, his "conservatism" in all things was so intense that much might be laid to the account of this tendency of his mind. Had he not written that "his soul had such an horror of English or Latin books containing new doctrines that, except the psalter and the New Testament, this last, too, in the Greek text, he had never taken any book, 'either small or big,' to use Plato's words, concerning Christian religion"?[34] Had he not recommended the bow as, even in those gunpowder times, the best weapon in war? "If I were of authority, I would counsel all the gentlemen and yeomen of England not to change it with any other thing, how good soever it seems to be; but that still, according to the old wont of England, youths should use it for the most honest pastime in peace, that men might handle it as a most sure weapon in war."[35] The other "strong weapons" must not lead men to forget this one: a thing they have nevertheless done.

Nothing dismayed by the threat of the dire consequences of Circe's wiles, travellers eager to see her crowded to the south. They continued not to "exchewe the way to Circes court, but go & ryde & runne & flie thether."[36] No education was complete without a sojourn on the continent. Surrey, Wyatt, Sidney, penniless Robert Greene, and hundreds if not thousands of others went there. There was an eagerness to see and to learn that no sight and no knowledge could satisfy, that no threat nor sermon could stop. Paris, Venice, Rome, Vienna, the Low Countries, received an ever-increasing flood of English visitors.

II.

England in her turn, not to mention the classics of antiquity that were being speedily translated, was flooded with French, Spanish, and Italian books, again to the great dismay of good Ascham. If "Morte d'Arthur" was bad, nothing worse could well be imagined than Italian books in general. "Ten 'Morte d'Arthures' do not the tenth part so much harme as one of these bookes made in Italie and translated in England." They are to be found "in every shop in London," and each of them can do more mischief than ten sermons at St. Paul's Cross can do good. They introduce into the land such refinements in vice "as the single head of an Englishman is not hable to invent."[37]



But, if unable to invent, the English seemed at least determined to enjoy and imitate, for translating and adapting went on at a marvellous pace. Boccaccio's "Filocopo,"[38] for instance, to speak only of the better known of these works, was translated in 1567, his "Amorous Fiametta, wherein is sette downe a catalogue of all and singular passions of love," in 1587; his "Decameron" in 1620. Guazzo's "Civile Conversation" was translated in 1586; Tasso's "Amynta" in 1587, and his "Recoverie of Hierusalem" in 1594. Castiglione's "Courtier ... very necessary and profitable for young gentlemen abiding in court, palace or place" was published in English in 1588. It was "profitable" in a rather different sense from the one Ascham would have given the word, for it contains lengthy precepts concerning assignations and love-making: "In my minde, the way which the courtier ought to take, to make his love knowne to the woman, me think should be to declare them in figures and tokens more than in wordes. For assuredly there is otherwhile a greater affection of love perceived in a sigh, in a respect, in a feare, than in a thousand wordes. Afterwarde, to make the eyes the trustie messengers that may carrie the Ambassades of the hart."[39] Many heroes in the English novels we shall have to study were apparently well read in Castiglione's "Courtier." Montemayor's Spanish "Diana," a tale of princes and shepherds, well known to Sidney, was published in 1598. Ariosto's "Orlando furioso" appeared in 1591, in a magnificently illustrated edition, and was dedicated to the Queen. The engravings, though sometimes said to be English, were in fact printed from the Italian plates of Girolamo Porro, of Padua, and had been used before in Italy.[40] Their circulation in England is none the less remarkable, and the influence such a publication may have had in the diffusing of Italian tastes in this country cannot be exaggerated. For those who had not been able to leave their native land, it was the best revelation yet placed before the public of the art of the Renaissance. That it was an important undertaking and a rather risky one, the translator, John Harington, was well aware; for he prefaced his book not only with his dedication to the Queen, a sort of thing to which Ascham had had great objection,[41] but by a "briefe apologie of poetrie," especially of that of Ariosto. It must be confessed that his arguments are far from convincing, and it would have been much better to have left the thing alone than to have defended the moral purposes of his author by such observations as these: "It may be and is by some objected that, although he writes christianly in some places, yet in some other, he is too lascivious.... Alas if this be a fault pardon him this one fault; though I doubt too many of you, gentle readers, wil be to exorable in this point, yea me thinks I see some of you searching already for those places of the booke and you are halfe offended that I have not made some directions that you might finde out and reade them immediately. But I beseech you ... to read them as my author ment them, to breed detestation and not delectation," &c. And he then appends to his book a table, by means of which the gentle readers will have no trouble in finding the objectionable passages enumerated in the "Apologie" itself.

At the same time as translations proper, many imitations were published, especially imitations of those shorter prose stories which were so numerous on the continent, and which had never been properly acclimatized in England during the Middle Ages. Their introduction into this country had a great influence on the further development of the novel; their success showed that there was a public for such literature; hence the writing of original tales of this sort in English. Among collections of foreign tales translated or imitated may be quoted Paynter's "Palace of Pleasure," 1566,[42] containing histories from Boccaccio, Bandello, Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, Straparole, the Spaniard Guevara, the Queen of Navarre, "and other italian and french authours." One of them is the history of "Rhomeo and Iulietta," from which Shakespeare derived his immortal drama; another tale in the same collection supplied the plot of "All's Well," and another the main events of "Measure for Measure." Then came G. Fenton's "Tragicall Discourses," 1567, finished at Paris and published by the author as the first-fruits of his travels; T. Fortescue's "Foreste or collection of histories ... done out of French," 1571; George Pettie's "Pettie Pallace of Pettie his pleasure," 1576; Robert Smyth's "Straunge and tragicall histories translated out of french," 1577; Barnabe Rich's "Farewell to militarie profession," 1584, where Shakespeare found the plot of "Twelfth Night"; G. Whetstone's "Heptameron of civill discourses," 1582; Ed. Grimeston's translation of the "Admirable and memorable histories" of Goulart, 1607, and several others.

Besides such collections many stories were separately translated and widely circulated. A number have been lost, but some remain, such, for instance, as "The adventures passed by Master F. I.," adapted by Gascoigne from the Italian,[43] or a certain "Hystorie of Hamblet," 1608,[44] which was destined to have great importance in English literature, or the "Goodli history of the ... Ladye Lucres of Scene in Tuskane and of her lover Eurialus," a translation from the Latin of AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini, and one of the most popular novels of the time. It went through twenty-three editions in the fifteenth century, and was eight times translated, one of the French translations being made "a la priere et requeste des dames." A German translation by Nicolaus von Wyle is embellished with coloured woodcuts of the most naive and amusing description. Three English translations were published, one before 1550, another in 1669, and a third in 1741.[45]



It is a tale of unlawful love, and tells how Lucrece a married lady of Sienna, fell in love with Eurialus, a knight of the court of the Emperor Sigismond. It is, we are told, a story of real life under fictitious names. The dialogue is easy, vigorous, and passionate, and the translator has well succeeded in transmuting these qualities into his yet unbroken mother tongue. Here, for instance, Lucrece is discussing with the faithful Zosias the subject of her love.

"Houlde thy peace quod Lucrece, there is no feare at all. Nothynge he feareth that feareth not death ...

"Oh! unhappie quod Zosias, thou shalt shame thy house, and onlye of all thy kynne thou shalte be adulteresse. Thinkest thou the deede can be secreate? A thousand eyne are about thee. Thy mother, if shee do accordinge, shall not suffer thy outrage to be prevye, not thy husbande, not thy cousyns, not thy maidens, ye, and thoughe thy servauntes woulde holde theyr peace, the bestes would speake it, y^e dogges, the poostes and the marble stones, and thoughe thou hyde all, thou canste not hyde it from God that seeth all ...

"I knowe quod she it is accordinge as thou sayest, but the rage maketh me folow the worse. My mynde knoweth howe I fall hedling, but furour hath overcom and reygneth, and over all my thought ruleth love. I am determined to folow the commandement of love. Overmuche alas have I wrestled in vaine; if thou have pytie on me, carye my mesage."[46]

If the German translation was adorned with woodcuts, the English text had an embellishment of a greater value; it consisted in the conclusion of the tale as altered by the English writer. In the Latin original of the future pope, Pius II., Lucrece dies, and Eurialus, having followed the Emperor back to Germany, mourns for her "till the time when Caesar married him to a virgin of a ducal house not less beautiful than chaste and wise," a very commonplace way of mourning for a dead mistress. This seemed insufferable to the English translator. Faithful as he is throughout, he would not take upon himself to alter actual facts, yet he thought right to give a different account of his hero's feelings: "But lyke as he folowed the Emperoure so dyd Lucres folow hym in hys sleep and suffred hym no nygtes rest, whom when he knew hys true lover to be deed, meaved by extreme dolour, clothed him in mournynge apparell, and utterly excluded all comforte, and yet though the Emperoure gave hym in mariage a ryghte noble and excellente Ladye, yet he never enjoyed after, but in conclusyon pitifully wasted his painful lyfe."[47]

The greater the display of feeling in such tales of Italian origin, the bitterer were the denunciations of moral censors, and the greater at the same time their popularity with the public. The quarrel did not abate for one minute during the whole of the century; the period is filled with condemnations of novels, dramas and poems, answered by no less numerous apologies for the same. The quarrel went on even beyond the century, the adverse parties meeting with various success as Cromwell ruled or Charles reigned; it can scarcely be said to have ever been entirely dropped, and the very same arguments used by Ascham against the Italian books of his time are daily resorted to against the French books of our own age.

Be this as it may, the Italian novels had the better of it in Elizabethan times; they were found not only "in every shop," but in every house; translations of them were the daily reading of Shakespeare, and as they had an immense influence not only in emancipating the genius of the dramatists of the period, but, what was of equal importance, in preparing an audience for them, we may be permitted to look at them with a more indulgent eye than the pre-Shakespearean moralists.

A curious list of books, belonging during this same period (1575) to a man of the lower middle class, an average member of a Shakespearean audience, has been preserved for us. It is to be found in a very quaint account of the Kenilworth festivities, sent by Robert Laneham, a London mercer, to a brother mercer of the same city. Laneham states how an acquaintance of his, Captain Cox, a mason by trade, had in his possession, not only "Kyng Arthurz book, Huon of Burdeaus, The foour suns of Aymon, Bevis of Hampton," and many of those popular romances, illustrated with woodcuts of which a few specimens are to be seen above, but also, mason as he was, the very same Italian book, the "Lucres and Eurialus," of which we have just given an account.[48]

With the diffusion of these small handy volumes of tales of all kinds, from all countries, a quite modern sort of literature, a literature for travellers, was being set on foot. Manuscript books did not easily lend themselves to be carried about; but it was otherwise with the printed pamphlets. Authors began to recommend their productions as convenient travelling companions, very much in the same manner as the publishers recommend them now as suitable to be taken to the Alps or to the seaside. Paynter, for example, who circulated in England from the year 1566 his collection of tales translated or imitated from Boccaccio and Bandello, Apuleius and Xenophon, the Queen of Navarre, and Bonaventure Desperriers, Belleforest and Froissart, Guevara and many others, assures his reader that: "Pleasaunt they be for that they recreate, and refreshe weried mindes defatigated either with painefull travaile or with continuall care, occasioning them to shunne and to avoid heavinesse of minde, vaine fantasies and idle cogitations. Pleasaunt so well abroad as at home, to avoide the griefe of winters night and length of sommers day, which the travailers on foote may use for a staye to ease their weried bodye, and the journeours on horsback, for a chariot or lesse painful meane of travaile in steade of a merie companion to shorten the tedious toyle of wearie wayes."[49]

It is pleasant to think of Shakespeare in some journey from Stratford to London, sitting under a tree, and in order to forget "the tedious toyle of wearie wayes," taking out of his pocket Paynter's book to dream of future Romeos and possible Helenas.

III.

The Italian and French languages were held in great honour; both were taught at Oxford and Cambridge; the latter especially was of common use in England, and this peculiarity attracted the notice of foreigners. "As regards their manners and mode of living, ornaments, garments and vestments," writes the Greek Nicander Nucius, in 1545, "they resemble the French more than others, and, for the most part, they use their language."[50] But besides these elegant languages, Greek and Latin were becoming courtly. They were taught in the schools and out of the schools; the nobles, following the example of King Henry VIII. and his children, made a parade of their knowledge. Ignorance was no longer the fashion, no more than the old towers without windows. The grave Erasmus went to hear Colet, the Dean of St. Paul's, and "he thought he was hearing Plato"; Sir T. More, according to Erasmus, is the "sweetest, softest, happiest genius nature has ever shaped." In a word, "literature is triumphant among the English. The king himself, the two cardinals, almost all the bishops, favour with all their soul and adorn Letters."[51] To learn Greek and Latin was to move with the times and to follow the fashion. "All men," says Ascham, less displeased with this novelty than with the travelling propensities of his compatriots, "covet to have their children speake latin"; and "Sophocles and Euripides are more familiar now here than Plautus was formerly."[52] Dazzled by what he saw and heard, Erasmus was announcing to the world in enthusiastic letters that "the golden age" was to be born again in this fortunate island.[53] His only regret was that he would perhaps not live long enough to see it. Well might he regret it, even though it were not to follow exactly as he had foreseen; for the golden apple of the golden age was not to be plucked in the Greek Hesperides' garden, but in a plain Warwickshire orchard: nor was it the less golden.

This fermentation of mind lasted for more than a century; lives were often shortened by it, but they had been doubly well filled. From this restless curiosity, bent towards past ages and foreign countries, towards everything that was remote, unknown and different, came that striking appearance of omniscience and universality, and that prodigious wealth of imagery, allusions and ideas of every kind that are to be found in all the authors of that time, small as well as great, and which unites in one common bond Rabelais and Shakespeare, Cervantes and Sidney and the "master of the enchanters of the ear," Ronsard.

When the armour, worn less often, began to grow rusty in the great halls, and the nobles, coming forth from their coats-of-mail like the butterfly from the chrysalis, showed themselves all glistening in silk, pearls in their ears, their heads full of Italian madrigals and mythological similes, a new society was formed, salons of a kind were organized, and the role of the women was enlarged. English mediaeval times had been by no means sparing of compliments to them. But there is a great difference between celebrating in verse fair, slim-necked ladies, and writing books expressly for them: and it is one of the points in which, during the Middle Ages and even until the middle of the sixteenth century, England differed from the nations of the south. In England no Lady Oisille had gathered round her in the depth of green valleys tellers of amorous stories; no thickly-shaded parks had seen Fiammettas or Philomenas listening to all kinds of narratives, forgetful of the actual world and its sorrows. The only group of story-tellers, bound together by a true artist's fancy, Chaucer's pilgrims, had ridden in broad daylight on the high road to Canterbury, led by Harry Bailly, the jovial innkeeper of Southwark, a blustering, red-faced dictator, who had regulated the pace of the nags, and silenced the tedious babblers: very different in all things from Fiammetta and the Lady Oisille.

Under the influence of Italy, France and mythology, the England of the Tudors, changed all that. Women appeared in the foreground: a movement of general curiosity animated the age, and they participated in it quite naturally. They will become learned, if necessary, rather than remain in the shade; they will no longer rest contented with permission to read books written for their fathers, brothers, lovers, or husbands; some must be written especially on their account, consulting their preferences and personal caprices; and they had good reason to command: one of them sat on the throne.

They, too, began to read Greek, Latin, Italian and French; knowledge was so much the fashion that it extended to women. Here Ascham bears testimony in their favour; the Queen herself gives the example: "She readeth now at Windsore more Greeke every day than some prebendarie of this chirch doth read Latin in a wole weeke."[54] In this she has innumerable imitators, so much so that Harrison sums up as follows his judgment concerning English ladies: "To saie how many gentlewomen and ladies there are, that beside sound knowledge of the Greeke and Latin toongs are thereto no lesse skilfull in the Spanish, Italian and French or in some one of them, it resteth not in me."[55]

It must not be believed, however, that so much Greek and Latin in any way imperilled the grace and ease of their manners, or that when you met them you would be welcomed with a quotation from Plato and dismissed with a verse from Virgil. Far from it. It was the custom at that time with English ladies to greet their friends and relations, and even strangers, with kisses, and strange as it may appear to our modern ideas, accustomed as we are to stare in amazement at such practices when by any chance we observe them in southern countries, the custom was so strikingly prevalent in England that travellers noticed it as one of the strange sights of the land; grave Erasmus cynically calls it one of its attractions. "This custom," says he, "will never be praised enough."[56] The above-named Nicander Nucius, of Corcyra, who came to England some fifty years later, notices the same habit as a great local curiosity. According to him, the English "display great simplicity and absence of jealousy in their usages towards females. For not only do those who are of the same family and household kiss them ... with salutations and embraces, but even those, too, who have never seen them. And to themselves this appears by no means indecent."[57] The very Queen herself, even in the middle of the most imposing ceremonies, could not help indulging in familiarities contrary to our ideas of decorum, but quite in accordance with the freedom of manners then prevalent. Sir James Melville relates in his memoirs how he was present when Robert Dudley was made "Earl of Leicester and baron of Denbigh; which was done at Westminster with great solemnity, the Queen herself helping to put on his ceremonial, he sitting upon his knees before her with a great gravity. But she could not refrain from putting her hand in his neck, smilingly tickling him, the French Ambassadour and I standing by. Then she turned, asking at me, 'how I liked him?'"[58]

The earliest attempts at the novel in the modern style bore a resemblance to these social and intellectual manners. Let us not be surprised if these works are too heavily bedizened for our liking: the toilettes and fashions of that time were less sober than those of to-day; it was the same with literature. Queen Elizabeth, who was wholly representative of her age, and shared even its follies, liked and encouraged finery in everything. All that was ornament and pageantry held her favour; in spite of public affairs, she remained all her life the most feminine of women; on her gowns, in her palaces, with her poets, she liked to find ornaments and embellishments in profusion. The learned queen who read Plutarch in Greek, a thing Shakespeare could never do, and translated Boetius into English,[59] found, in spite of her philosophy, an immense delight in having herself painted in fantastic costumes, her thin person hidden in a silken sheath, covered by a light gauze, over which birds ran. Around her was a perpetual field of cloth of gold, and the nobles sold their lands in order to appear at Court sufficiently embroidered. She liked nothing better than to hear and take part in conversations on dresses and fashions. This was so well known, that when Mary, Queen of Scots, sent the same Sir James Melville on his mission to the English Court, in 1564, she was careful to advise him not to forget such means to propitiate her "dear sister." The account left by Melville of the way in which he carried into effect this part of his instructions is highly characteristic of the times, and gives an idea of the way in which a courtly conversation was then conducted:

"The Queen my mistress," says Melville, in his "Memoires," "had instructed me to leave matters of gravity sometimes, and cast in merry purposes, lest otherwise I should be wearied [wearying], she being well informed of that queens natural temper. Therefore in declaring my observations of the customs of Dutchland, Poland and Italy, the buskins of the women was not forgot, and what countrey weed I thought best becoming gentlewomen. The Queen said she had cloths of every sort, which every day thereafter, so long as I was there, she changed. One day she had the English weed, another the French, and another the Italian and so forth.

"She asked me which of them became her best?

"I answered, in my judgment the Italian dress, which answer I found pleased her well, for she delighted to shew her golden coloured hair, wearing a caul and bonnet as they do in Italy. Her hair was more reddish than yellow, curled in appearance naturally.

"She desired to know of me what colour of hair was reputed best, and which of them two was fairest.

"I answered the fairness of them both was not their worst faults.

"But she was earnest with me to declare which of them I judged fairest?

"I said she was the fairest Queen of England, and mine the fairest Queen of Scotland.

"Yet she appeared earnest.

"I answered they were both the fairest Ladies in their countries; that Her Majesty was whiter, but my Queen was very lovely.

"She inquired which of them was of highest stature?

"I said my Queen.

"Then saith she, she is too high, for I, my self, am neither too high nor too low. Then she asked what kind of exercise she used?

"I answered that when I received my dispatch, the Queen was lately come from the High-land hunting. That when her more serious affairs permitted, she was taken up with reading of histories; that sometimes she recreated her self in playing upon the lute and virginals.

"She asked if she played well? I said reasonably, for a Queen.

"That same day after dinner my Lord of Hunsdean drew me up to a quiet gallery, that I might hear some musick, but he said that he durst not avow it, where I might hear the Queen play upon the virginals. After I had hearkned a while, I took up the tapistry that hung before the door of the chamber, and seeing her back was toward the door, I entered within the chamber, and stood a pretty space hearing her play excellently well, but she left off immediately, so soon as she turned her about and saw me. She appeared to be surprized to see me, and came forward, seeming to strike me with her hand, alledging she used not to play before men, but when she was solitary to shun melancholly."

Fortunately she does not strike the ambassador, and is easily pacified. She wants to dazzle him also with her knowledge of languages:

"She said my French was good, and asked if I could speak Italian which she spoke reasonably well.... Then she spake to me in Dutch [i.e., German], which was not good; and would know what kind of books I most delighted in, whether theology, history, or love matters." She manages to keep Melville two days longer than he had intended to stay "till I might see her dance, as I was afterward informed. Which being over, she inquired of me whether she or my Queen danced best? I answered the Queen danced not so high and disposedly as she did."

This woman, nevertheless, with so many frailties and ultra-feminine vanities, was a sovereign with a will and a purpose. Even in the midst of this talk about buskins, love-books and virginals, it shone out. So much so, that hearing she is resolved not to marry, the Scottish ambassador immediately retorts in somewhat blunt fashion: "I know the truth of that, madam, said I, and you need not tell it me. Your Majesty thinks if you were married, you would be but Queen of England, and now you are both King and Queen. I know your spirit cannot endure a commander."[60]

The same singular combination may be observed in the literary works of her time: flowers of speech and vanities abound, but they are not without an aim. Rarely was any sovereign so completely emblematic of his or her period. She may almost be said to be the key to it; and it may be very well asserted that whatever the branch of art or literature of this epoch you wish to understand, you must first study Elizabeth.

Her taste for finery and jewels remained to the last. Hentzner, a German, who saw her many years after Melville, describes her coming out of her chapel at Greenwich Palace, in 1598. She has greatly altered; she is no longer the young princess that would publicly forget etiquette at Westminster for the sake of Robert Dudley; but she still glitters with jewels and ornaments. "Next came the Queen, in the sixty-fifth year of her age, as we were told, very majestic; her face oblong, fair, but wrinkled, her eyes small, yet black and pleasant; her nose a little hooked, her lips narrow, and her teeth black.... She had in her ears two pearls, with very rich drops; she wore false hair and that red; upon her head she had a small crown.... Her bosom was uncovered as all the English ladies have till they marry, and she had on a necklace of exceeding fine jewels; her hands were small, her fingers long, and her stature neither tall nor low; her air was stately, her manner of speaking kind and obliging. That day she was dressed in white silk, bordered with pearls of the size of beans, and over it a mantle of black silk, shot with silver threads ... Instead of a chain, she had an oblong collar of gold and jewels."[61]



These descriptions of her by Melville and Hentzner are supplemented, in highly characteristic fashion, not only by such fancy portraits as the one alluded to before, where she is represented as a shepherdess, a nymph, an imaginary being from Arcady, from mythology, or from nowhere, but by such grave, dignified, official portraitures as the very fine engraving left by Rogers. Round the sharp-featured face, with closed, wilful lips, weary eyes, open, intelligent forehead, lace ruffs of various shapes, some very bushy, some quite flat and round-shaped like butterfly wings, are displayed in most imposing array. No imaginable kind of gum or starch could keep them straight; they were spread on iron wires. The gown itself, of cylindric shape, expanded by means of a farthingale, is covered with knobs, knots, pearls, ribbons, fringes, and ornaments of all sorts. Well does this figure deserve the attention of the student of Shakespeare, for in this and no other fashion was Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen, dressed, when she appeared on the boards of the Globe Theatre. Never did the author of "Antony" dream of Denderah's temple, and of the soft, voluptuous face, peacock-covered, representing there Isis-Cleopatra; but he dressed his Egyptian queen as the queen he had known had been dressed, and it was in the costumes of Rogers' engraving, and most appropriately too, that the Cleopatra of the Globe was heard to make the remarkable proposal, "Let's to billiards."[62]

Does this seem very strange or in any way incredible? But we must remember that many years, nay, several centuries, were to elapse before anything like historical accuracy was to affect dresses on the stage. Another Cleopatra trod the boards of the English theatre in the eighteenth century; she was very different from her Elizabethan elder sister; she wore paniers and a Louis XV. wig, and, as may be seen in our engraving, came in no way nearer the model at Denderah.



The architecture of this period corresponded with the richness and pomp of the costumes. A new style, partly from Italy, partly from dreamland, was introduced into England during the Tudor and early Jacobean times. There was lace, and knots and knobs and curious holes, pillars, and pilasters. The sincerest admirers of antiquity, such as Inigo Jones, who went to Italy with such good purpose, and there filled his albums with many exquisite sketches of antique and Renaissance masterpieces,[63] could not refrain from sometimes introducing Arcady and dreamland into their architecture. Inigo Jones died before finishing his Whitehall palace, and we know from his drawings that he intended to embellish the central circular court with a row of gigantic caryatides representing Persians, six or seven yards high.[64] A contriver of masks for the Court, Inigo Jones, was in this way tempted to build palaces, if one may say so, in mask-style. Such houses as Audley End, Hatfield, and especially Burghley, this last being mostly Elizabethan,[65] are excellent representations of the architectural tastes of the time; the thick windowless towers of a former age are replaced by palatial facades, where countless enormous windows occupy more space in the wall than the bricks and stones themselves. Not a few people of a conservative turn of mind were heard to grumble at these novelties: "And albeit," said Harrison, in 1577, at the very time when Lord Burghley was busy building his house in Northamptonshire, "that in these daies there be manie goodlie houses erected in the sundrie quarters of this Iland; yet they are rather curious to the eie, like paper worke than substantiall for continuance; whereas such as he [Henry VIII.] did set up, excel in both and therefore may justlie be preferred farre above all the rest." But notwithstanding such a threatening prophecy neither at Burghley nor at Hatfield has the "paper worke" put there been yet blown away by storm or time, and these houses continue to afford a safe residence to the descendants of the Cecils. According to Harrison's judgment the interior of the new houses, no less than the exterior, testified to a decadence: "Now have we manie chimnies; and yet our tenderlings complaine of rheumes, catarhs and poses. Then had we none but reredosses; and our heads did never ake. For as the smoke in those daies was supposed to be a sufficient hardening of the timber of the house, so it was reputed a far better medicine to keepe the goodman and his familie from the quacke or pose, wherewith, as then verie few were acquainted."[66]

But Harrison's blame does not seem to have greatly affected the taste for chimneys, any more than his sinister prophecies concerning Elizabethan houses have been fulfilled; chimneys have continued, and paper-work houses remain still to help us if need be to understand the poetry, the drama, and the novel of the period.



FOOTNOTES:

[30] "La doncques, Francoys, marchez couraigeusement vers ceste superbe cite romaine; & des serves depouilles d'elle, comme vous avez fait plus d'une fois, ornez vos temples & autelz.... Pillez moi sans conscience les sacrez thesors de ce temple Delphique ... Vous souvienne de vostre ancienne Marseille, secondes Athenes!" ("La Deffense et illustration de la langue Francoyse," 1549).

[31] "The Scholemaster," London, 1570, 4to, p. 26; Arber's reprint, 1870, 4to, pp. 83, et seq. Ascham had died in 1568; this work was published by his widow.

[32] Preface dated 1581 to "Civile Conversation," London, 1586, 4to.

[33] The novelist Greene, for example, and the novelist Lyly. The latter writes in his "Euphues," 1579: "Let not your mindes be caryed away with vaine delights, as with travailing into farre & straunge countries, wher you shal see more wickednesse then learn vertue & wit" (Arber's reprint, 1868, p. 152). As for Greene, see infra, chap. iv. One of the most curious of these denunciations of travel was the "Quo vadis? a juste censure of travel," by Bishop Joseph Hall, 1617, 12mo. The author demonstrates that most of the vices of the English are of foreign importation, chiefly from France and Italy; good qualities alone are native and national. The best thing to do, then, is to keep at home.

[34] Letter (in Latin) to the Archbishop of York, 1544. "Works," ed. Giles, London, 1865, 4 vol. 16mo, vol. i. p. 35.

[35] "Toxophilus," 1545, in "Works," ed. Giles, vol. ii. p. 5.

[36] "Scholemaster," 1570, Arber's reprint, p. 77.

[37] "The Scholemaster," Arber's reprint, pp. 79, 80.

[38] "A pleasant disport of divers noble personages ... intituled Philocopo ... englished by H. G[ifford?]," London, 1567, 4to; "Amorous Fiametta, wherein is sette downe a catalogue of all & singular passions of love and jealosie incident to an enamoured yong gentlewoman ... done into English by B. Giovano [i.e., B. Young]," London, 1587; "The Decameron, containing an hundred pleasant novels," London, 1620, fol. (with woodcuts); "The Civile Conversation ... translated ... by G. Pettie ... and B. Yong," London, 1586, 4to; "The lamentations of Amyntas ... translated out of latine into english hexameters," by Abraham Fraunce, London, 1587, 4to; "Godfray of Bulloigne, or the recoverie of Hierusalem ... translated by R. C[arew] ... imprinted in both languages," London, 1594; "The courtier of Count Baldesar Castillo ... done into English by Th. Hobby," London, 1588, 8vo (contains an Italian, English and French text); "Diana of George of Montemayor, translated by B. Yong," London, 1598, fol. Among other translations three of the most important were Lord Berners' "Froysshart," "translated out of Frenche into our maternall Englysshe tonge," 1522, North's translation of Plutarch after the French of Amyot (1579), and Florio's translation of Montaigne, 1603, fol., which were well known to the dramatists, and went through several editions. The British Museum possesses a copy of Florio's Montaigne, which was the property of Ben Jonson. A far more satisfactory translation of the same author was made by Cotton, 1685-6, 3 vol. 8vo.

[39] Sig. F. f. 1.

[40] "Orlando Furioso, in English heroical verse," by John Harington, London, 1591, fol. The plates were used in the Italian edition: "Orlando Furioso ... novamente adornato di Figure di Rame da Girolamo Porro Padouano," Venice, 1588, 4to. There is, however, a difference in the frontispiece, where the allegorical figure of Peace is replaced in the English edition by a portrait of Harington, engraved by Thomas Coxon, who signed as if the whole frontispiece was by his hand. We give a reduced fac-simile of this frontispiece.

[41] He had written in his "Scholemaster": These "fond books" are "dedicated over boldlie to vertuous and honourable personages, the easelier to beguile simple and innocent wittes. It is pitie that those which have authority and charge to allow and dissallow bookes to be printed, be no more circumspect herein than they are." (Arber's reprint, p. 79).

[42] Old Style. The dedication is dated: "Nere the Tower of London the first of Januarie 1566."

[43] First published in Gascoigne's "Hundreth sundrie flowres bound up in one small poesie," London, 1572, 4to.

[44] Translated from the French of Belleforest, who had himself translated it from Bandello. Though the date of the only known edition of the story in English is later than the production of "Hamlet," it seems to have been known before, and to have been used by Shakespeare. See Furnivall's "Leopold Shakspere," p. lxix.

[45] "The historie of ... Plasidas and other rare pieces," ed. H. H. Gibbs, Roxburghe Club, London, 1873, 4to. One of these "pieces," prefaced with an important introduction, is the "Goodli history" of Lady Lucrece.

[46] Ut supra, p. 119.

[47] Here is Piccolomini's text: "Sed ut ipse Caesarem, sic eum Lucretia sequebatur in somnis, nullamque noctem sibi quietam permittebat. Quam ut obiisse verus amator cognovit, magno dolore permotus, lugubrem vestem recepit; nec consolationem admisit, nisi postquam Caesar ex ducalo sanguine virginem sibi cum formosam tum castissimam atque prudentem matrimonio junxit." The French translator did not alter this end. It will be remembered that the conclusion of Chaucer's "Troilus" compares in the same way with Boccaccio's and with the French translator's, Pierre de Beauveau.

[48] "Captain Cox, his ballads and books, or Robert Laneham's Letter ... 1575," ed. F. J. Furnivall, London, Ballad Society, 1871, 8vo, p. 29.

[49] Epistle to the reader, prefacing the "Palace of Pleasure."

[50] That there was also in London a public for Italian books is shown, among many other proofs, by the early publication thereof an edition of the "Pastor Fido" of Guarini in the original, London, 1591, 12mo.

[51] "Epistolarum ... libri xxxi.," London, 1642, fol., col. 308, 533, 364, &c. A.D. 1497 and 1519.

[52] "The Scholemaster," p. 2, and Letter to Brandesby (in Latin), 1542-3; "Works," ed. Giles, tom. i. p. 25.

[53] "Equidem aureum quoddam seculum exoriri video, quo mihi fortassis non continget frui, quippe qui jam ad fabulae meae catastrophem accedam" (Letter to Henry of Guildford, May, 1519, "Epistolarum ... libri xxxi.," London, 1642, fol., col. 368)

[54] "The Scholemaster," p. 21.

[55] "Description of Britaine," 1577, ed. Furnivall, New Shakspere Society, part i, p. 271.

[56] "Est praeterea mos nunquam satis laudatus. Sive quo venias omnium osculis exciperis; sive discedas aliquo, osculis dimitteris; redis, redduntur suavia ... denique quocumque te moveas, suaviorum plena sunt omnia" ("Epistolarum ... libri.," London, 1642, col. 315, A.D. 1499).

[57] "The second book of the travels of Nicander Nucius," ed. Cramer, London, Camden Society, 1841, 4to, p. 10. Nucius resided in England in 1545-6.

[58] "The Memoires of Sir James Melvil, of Hal-hill," ed. G. Scott. London, 1683, fol. p. 47.

[59] The autograph manuscript of her translations, which comprise a part of the works of Plutarch, Horace and Boetius, was found in 1883, at the Record Office.

[60] "Memoires," London, 1683, pp. 49 et seq.

[61] "Travels in England," ed. H. Morley, London, 1889, p. 47.

[62] "Antony and Cleopatra," act ii. sc. 5. As for a reproduction of Rogers' engraving, see Frontispiece of this volume.

[63] An album of sketches of this sort, made by Inigo Jones while in Italy, 1614, was reproduced in fac-simile by the care of the Duke of Devonshire, London, 1832. See also drawings, by the same, for scenery and costumes in masks in the "Portfolio," May, June, and July, 1889, three articles by Mr. R. T. Blomfield. Isaac Oliver the famous Elizabethan miniature painter, has left also drawings, one of which is reproduced at the head of this chapter, testifying to his careful study of Italian models.

[64] A view of this court, with the caryatides, is to be seen in W. Kent, "The Designs of Inigo Jones," London, 1835, two vol. fol. We give a reproduction of the caryatides.

[65] It was built on the plans, as is supposed, of J. Thorpe, possibly with the help of the Italian John of Padua. Above one of the doors of the inner court is the date 1577; the clock tower is dated 1585; see the engraving p. 69. Hatfield bears on its facade the date 1611. Audley End was built 1603-1616.

[66] "Description of Britaine," ed. Furnivall, New Shakspere Society, part i. pp. 268 and 338.



CHAPTER III.

LYLY AND HIS "EUPHUES."

I.

The romance which, at this period, received a new life, and was to come nearer to our novels than anything that had gone before, has many traits in common with the fanciful style of the architecture, costume, and conversation described above. What have we to do, thought men, with things practical, convenient, or of ordinary use? We wish for nothing but what is brilliant, unexpected, extraordinary. What is the good of setting down in writing the incidents of commonplace lives? Are they not sufficiently known to us? does not their triviality sadden us enough every day? If we are told stories of imaginary lives, let them at least be dissimilar from our own; let them offer unforeseen incidents; let the author be free to turn aside from reality provided that he leaves the trivial and the ordinary. Let him lead us to Verona, Athens, into Arcadia, where he will, but as far as possible from Fleet Street! And if by ill-luck he sets foot in Fleet Street, let him at least speak the language of Arcadia!

Authors found this advice excellent, and took good care to relieve themselves of difficult search after the mere truth. The public who imposed these laws, this exacting public of women who read Plutarch and Plato, who judged the merits of great men as learnedly as the cut of a ruff, found at the very moment they most wanted him the author who could please them in the person of a novel writer, the famous Lyly. At twenty-five years of age, John Lyly, a protege of Lord Burghley, who was at this same time busy with his own architectural poem, if one may say so, of Burghley House, wrote "Euphues,"[67] a new kind too of "paper-work" with which people were enraptured.

It was written expressly for women, and not only did the author not conceal the circumstance, but he proclaimed it aloud. Their opinion alone interested him, to that of the critics he was indifferent. "It resteth Ladies," he said, "that you take the paines to read it, but at such times, as you spend in playing with your little dogges, and yet will I not pinch you of that pastime, for I am content that your dogges lie in your laps: so 'Euphues' may be in your hands, that when you shall be wearie in reading of the one, you may be ready to sport with the other.... 'Euphues' had rather lye shut in a Ladyes casket, then open in a Schollers studie." Yet after dinner, "Euphues" will still be agreeable to the ladies, adds Lyly, always smiling; if they desire to slumber, it will bring them to sleep which will be far better than beginning to sew and pricking their fingers when they begin to nod.[68]

There is no possibility of error; with Lyly commences in England the literature of the drawing-room, that of which we speak at morning calls, productions which, in spite of vast and many changes, still occupy a favourite place on the little boudoir tables. We must also notice what pains Lyly gives himself to make his innovation a success, and so please his patronesses, and how he ornaments his thoughts and engarlands his speeches, how cunningly he imbues himself with the knowledge of the ancients and of foreigners, and what trouble he gives himself to improve upon the most learned and the most florid of them. His care was not thrown away. He was spoiled, petted, and caressed by the ladies; with an impartial heart they extended to the author the same favour they granted to the book, and to their little dogs. He was proclaimed king of letters by his admirers, and became, in fact, king of the precieux. He created a school, and the name of his hero served to baptize a whole literature. This particular form of bad style was called euphuism.

II.

Euphuism owes to him its name and its diffusion in England; but not, although it is usually so stated, its birth. This strange language, as Dr. Landmann[69] has well demonstrated, was imported from Spain into England, and Lyly was not the first to use it in this country. The works of Guevara, turned into English by five or six different translators, had a considerable vogue and acclimatized this extraordinary style in Great Britain. One of his writings especially, "The golden boke of Marcus Aurelius, emperour," enjoyed a very great popularity; it was translated by Lord Berners in 1532, and by Sir Thomas North in 1557,[70] and went through many editions. The moral dissertations of which it is full enchanted serious minds; the unusual language of Spain delighted frivolous souls. Before Lyly, English authors had already imitated it; but when Lyly appeared and embellished it even more, enthusiasm ran so high that its foreign progenitor was forgotten, and this exotic style was rebaptized as proof of adoption and naturalization in England.

Since it is not a natural product, but the mere result of ingenious artifices, nothing is easier than to reduce it to its component parts, to take it to pieces so to speak. It consists in an immoderate, prodigious, monstrous use of similes, so arranged as to set up antitheses in every limb of the sentence. What is peculiar to the English imitators, is the employment of alliteration, in order to better mark the balance of the sentences written for effect. Finally, the kind of similes even has something peculiar: they are for the most part borrowed from an imaginary ancient history and a fantastical natural history, a sort of mythology of plants and stones to which the most extraordinary virtues are attributed.

In the important parts, when he means to use a noble style, Lyly cannot relate the most trivial incident without setting up parallels between the sentiments of his characters and the virtues of toads, serpents, unicorns, scorpions, and all the fantastical animals mentioned in Pliny or described in the bestiaries of the Middle Ages. His knowledge of zoology resembles that of Richard de Fournival, who, in the thirteenth century, lamented in his "Bestiaire d'Amour,"[71] that he was like the wolf, who, when instead of first noticing the man, allowed the man to see him first, lost all his courage; or like the cricket who loves chirping so much that he forgets to eat and allows himself to be caught. Richard was overcome in like manner by the glances of his mistress, and all his songs only served to accomplish his ruin. The woman he loves resembles the bird called "Kalander," or again, the animal called "cockatrice" or "cocodrille," which is often mentioned by Lyly. "Its nature is such that when it finds a man, then it devours him, and when it has devoured him, then it laments him all the days of its life."[72] Such is the conduct, says Richard, of women too beautiful and too much beloved.



Bestiaries had enjoyed an immense popularity from the earliest times. They were not all, far from it, like Richard de Fournival's, love-bestiaries; most of them had a religious tendency. Such were, for example, in England, the well-known Anglo-Saxon bestiary,[73] or the English bestiary of the thirteenth century, in which we read of the world-famous wickedness of the whale who allows sailors to rest on her back, and even to light a fire thereon, in order to warm themselves; but as soon as she feels the heat she dives and drowns them all: an example of what may be expected from the devil. There is, too, the elephant that leans against a tree to take his rest. People cunningly cut the tree, and replace it; when the elephant comes the tree falls and so does he, and is caught, an emblem of our father Adam, who also owed his fall to a tree.[74] Again the "Contes Moralises" of Nicole Bozon, written in French by a friar who lived in England in the first half of the fourteenth century, are also full of the most curious comparisons between the properties of animals, plants, and minerals, and the sinful tendencies and frailties of mankind.[75]

These are old, far-off examples, and it might be supposed that people of education in Elizabethan England would have possessed a sounder knowledge of natural history. This was, however, not the case. And if we wish to know what were the current beliefs among well-informed men of the time about animals, we have only to open the two folio volumes penned with greatest care by painstaking Topsell, concerning "Foure-footed beastes" and "Serpents."[76] We shall then willingly set Lyly and his followers free from all blame of exaggeration and improbable inventions. Most often indeed they did not invent; they knew. Topsell's books are nothing but a careful summary of the then generally accepted reports concerning animated creation.

His histories are the more curious as his scruples and earnestness are obvious. His purpose is high, and he means to write only for the Creator's glory, considering his subject to be a "part of Divinity that was never known in English. I take my owne conscience to witness, which is manifest to my Judge and Saviour, I have intended nothing but his glory, that is the creator of all." Secondly, his serious attention to his subject is shown by what he says of accessible animals; the engravings he gives of them, of dogs, for instance, of bulls, asses, and many others being really excellent. Even rare animals, when by any chance he had secured a glimpse of them, are represented with the utmost care; such, for instance, is his chameleon, of which he gives a very good engraving, not long after careless Robert Greene had been writing of "this byrd, a camelion."[77]

But, then, nature is full of surprises, and so is Topsell's book. His antelopes are very dangerous things: "They have hornes ... which are very long and sharpe; so that Alexander affirmed they pierced through the sheeldes of his souldiers, and fought with them very irefully: at which time his companions slew as he travelled to India, 8,550; which great slaughter may be the occasion why they are so rare and sildome seene to this day." Undoubtedly.



The blood of the elephant has a very strange property: "Also it is reported that the blood of an elephant is the coldest blood in the world and that Dragons in the scorching heate of summer cannot get anything to coole them except this blood." The sea-horse, or hippopotamus, "is a most ugly and filthy beast, so called because in his voice and mane he resembleth a horsse, but in his head an oxe or a calfe; in the residue of his body a swine.... It liveth for the most part in rivers; yet it is of a doubtful life, for it brings forth and breedeth on the land." According to the accompanying engraving he apparently feeds on crocodiles. The rhinoceros is remarkable for his breathing: he "hath a necke like unto a horsse and also the other parts of his body, but it is said to breath out aire which killeth men."

But in this world of animals, which includes the Mantichora, the Sphinga, the Papio, and a monster alive "in the territory of the bishop of Salceburgh," the most interesting is the Lamia. It is of such great interest because its very existence has been disputed, but quite wrongly. Some untrue reports were circulated concerning this animal, and as these accounts were fabulous, people have been found who disbelieved, not only the stories, but even the possibility that Lamiae existed. Topsell wisely takes a middle course: "These and such like stories and opinions there are of Phairies, which in my judgment arise from the praestigious apparitions of Devils, whose delight is to deceive and beguile the minds of men with errour, contrary to the truths of holye scripture which doeth no where make mention of such inchaunting creatures; and therefore if any such be, we will holde them the workes of the Devill and not of God." But, then, there are true Lamiae, and "we shall take for granted by the testimony of holy scripture that there is such a beast as this." The particulars Topsell was able to gather about them are to the following effect: "The hinde parts of this beast are like unto a goate, his fore legs like a beares, his upper parts to a woman, the body scaled all over like a Dragon, as some have observed, by the observation of their bodies." Their wickedness is so great that it scarcely bears description: "They are the swiftest of foot of all earthly beasts, so as none can escape them by running, for by their celerity, they compasse their prey of beastes, and by their fraud, they overthrow men. For when as they see a man, they lay open their breastes, and by the beauty thereof entice them to come neare to conference, and so having them within their compasse, they devoure and kill them." So much for four-footed beasts.[78]



The "Historie of serpents" is not less instructive, for it contains, "with their lively figures: names, conditions, kindes and natures of all venomous beasts: with their severall poisons and antidotes; their deepe hatred to mankind and the wonderfull worke of God in their creation and destruction." Among serpents are included: bees, drones, wasps, hornets, frogs, toads, tortoises, spiders, earthworms, and many other unexpected "venomous beasts." There is in this book information concerning the boas: "The Latines call it Boa and Bossa of Bos because by sucking cowes milke it so encreaseth that in the end it destroyeth all manner of herdes and cattels." The cockatrice, above named, "seemeth to be the king of serpents ... because of his stately face and magnanimous mind." The crocodile is to be carefully avoided, "even the Egyptians themselves account a crocodile a savage and cruell murthering beast, as may appeare by their Hieroglyphicks, for when they will decypher a mad man, they picture a crocodile." And Topsell goes on to relate the particular hatred which existed between crocodiles and the inhabitants of Tentyris, that exquisitely charming Denderah which overlooks the valley of the Nile, and still deserves its old fame as the chief temple of the Goddess Athor, the Egyptian Aphrodite.

The dipsas, the hydra, the dragon, are also endowed with the most remarkable qualities; but they seem to have disappeared since Topsell's day. Not so another very wonderful animal of whom we continue to hear from time to time, I mean the great sea-serpent; this marvellous beast is not only described, but depicted in our naturalist's book. Topsell gives a faithful portrait of it, and we do the same. These animals are so big that "many a time, they overthrow in the waters a laden vessell of great quantitie, with all the wares therein contained." The engraving shows one of them upsetting a three-masted Jacobean ship and swallowing sailors, apparently with great relish and voracity.[79]

Such being the current belief among students of the natural sciences, we may be the better prepared to excuse some eccentricities in a novelist. Lyly, who was well versed in the legendary lore of plants and animals, is never tired of making a display of his knowledge, but the wonder is that his readers had never too much of that. A single erudite or scientific simile never satisfies Lyly; he has always in his hands a long bead-roll of them, which he complacently pays out: "The foul toade hath a faire stone in his head, the fine golde is found in the filthy earth: the sweet kernell lyeth in the hard shell: vertue is harboured in the heart of him that most men esteeme mishapen ... Doe we not commonly see that in painted pottes is hidden the deadlyest poyson? that in the greenest grasse is ye greatest serpent? in the cleerest water the uglyest toade?" and four or five similes still follow. Tormented by examples, overwhelmed with similitudes, the adventurous reader, who to-day risks a reading of "Euphues," feels it impossible to keep his composure. He would like to protest, to defend himself, to say that he has lied, this imperturbable naturalist, that bitter kernels are found indeed in the hardest shells, that painted pots often contain something other than poison, and that if toads appear less ugly in foul water, it is perhaps because they are the less seen. But what does it matter to Lyly? He writes for a select coterie, and when a man writes for a coterie, the protestations of the discontented, of the envious, alas! of those of good sense, too, are scarcely of any consequence. Let the common herd then shriek themselves hoarse at Lyly's door: it is shut fast, he will hear nothing, and is indifferent even if among this common herd Shakespeare figures. He is happy; "Euphues," in company with the little dogs, rumples the silken laps of ladies with the lace-plaited ruffs.



III.

But however important style may be, it is not everything in a literary work. It must be acknowledged that Lyly's success, if it is no commendation of the taste of his contemporaries, is greatly to the credit of their morality and earnestness. By the form of his sentences Lyly is a Spaniard; he surpasses the most bombastic, and could give points to that author mentioned by Louis Racine, who, discovering his mistress lying under a tree, cried: "Come and see the sun reclining in the shade!" But the basis of his character is purely English; he is truly of the same country as Richardson, and belongs at heart to that race which Tacitus said did not know how "to laugh at vices," a very high praise that Rousseau rendered later almost in the same terms.[80] From the time of Lyly until our own day, the English novel, generally speaking, has remained not only moral, but a moralizing agent; the author has recourse to a thousand skilful and fascinating devices, and leads us by the hand through all sorts of flowery paths; but whatever the manner may be, he almost invariably, without saying so, leads us to the sermon. There are sermons in Defoe, who strongly protested against some abbreviations of his "Robinson Crusoe": "They strip it of all those reflections as well religious as moral, which are not only the greatest beauties of the work, but are calculated for the infinite advantage of the reader."[81] There are sermons in Richardson, so much so that it might rather be said that novels are to be noticed in Richardson's magnificent series of sermons. This is the way he himself would have spoken. Did he not write to Lady Bradsaigh, while forwarding her the last volumes of "Clarissa": "Be pleased ... to honour these volumes with a place with your Taylor's Holy Living and Dying, with your Practice of piety, and Nelson's Fasts and Festivals, not as being worthy of such company, but that they may have a chance of being dipt into thirty years hence. For I persuade myself, they will not be found utterly unworthy of such a chance, since they appear in the humble guise of novel, only by the way of accommodation to the manners and taste of an age overwhelmed with luxury, and abandoned to sound and senselessness."[82] There are some sermons in Fielding, many in Dickens, not a few in George Eliot, and even in Thackeray. Splendid they are, most eloquent, most admirable in their kind, most beneficial in their way; but there is no denying that sermons they are. Unfortunately for Lyly, what formerly constituted the attraction of "Euphues," and hid the sermon's bitterness, makes it to-day ridiculous and even odious: it is the style. Let us forget for a moment his unicorns and his scorpions; taken in himself, his hero deserves attention, because he is the ancestor in direct line of Grandison, of Lord Orville, of Lord Colambre, and of all the sermonizing lords, and lords of good example, that England owed to the success of Richardson.



Euphues is a young Athenian, a contemporary not of Pericles, but of Lyly, who goes to Naples, thence to England, to study men and governments. Grave with that gravity peculiar to lay preachers, well-informed on every subject, even on his own merits, assured by his conscience that in making mankind sharer in his illumination, he will assure their salvation, he addresses moral epistles to his fellow men to guide them through life. Omniscient like the inheritors of his vein whom we have heard since, he instructs the world in the truth about marriage, travel, religion. He anticipates, in his discourses concerning aristocracy, the philosophical ideas of "Milord Edouard," of "Nouvelle Heloise" fame; he treats of love with the wisdom of Grandison, and of the bringing up of children with the experience of Pamela.[83]

When women are his subject he is especially earnest and eloquent, and having, as it seems, suffered much at their hands he concludes: "Come to me al ye lovers that have bene deceived by fancy, the glasse of pestilence, or deluded by woemen, the gate to perdition; be as earnest to seeke a medicine, as you were eager to runne into a mischiefe." Having thus secured, as it seems, a fairly large audience, he begins his sermon, which he is pleased to call, "a cooling carde for Philautus, and all fond lovers."[84] His intention is to give men remedies, which shall cure them of loving. Some of his precepts resemble the wise advice of Rondibilis to Panurge; some do not. Philautus is to avoid solitude, and idleness; he must study. In the same way Panurge is recommended labeur assidu and fervente estude.[85] Philautus is advised to try law, "whereby thou mayest have understanding of olde and auntient customes;" if law proves of no avail, there is "Physicke," and if this again fails, then there is "the atteining of ye sacred and sincere knowledge of divinitie." Study then may be supplemented by contemptuous meditations about women;[86] a remedy which Rabelais, who probably knew more of life than twenty-five-years-old Lyly, refrains from recommending.

This part of the anathema, including as it does a description of the superfluities of Elizabethan dress, is especially worth noticing: "Take from them," cries Euphues, in a burst of eloquence, "their perywigges, their paintings, their jewells, their rowles, their boulstrings, and thou shalt soone perceive that a woman is the least part of hir selfe. When they be once robbed of their robes, then wil they appeare so odious, so ugly, so monstrous, that thou wilt rather think them serpents then saints, and so like hags, that thou wilt feare rather to be enchaunted than enamoured. Looke in their closettes, and there shalt thou finde an appoticaryes shop of sweete confections, a surgions boxe of sundry salves, a pedlers packe of newe fangles. Besides all this their shadows, their spots, their lawnes, their leefekyes, their ruffes, their rings, shew them rather cardinalls curtisans then modest matrons.... If every one of these things severally be not of force to move thee, yet all of them joyntly should mortifie thee." This was, however, by no means the case, and Philautus not so much "cooled" by this "carde" as his friend expected, behaved himself in such a way as to demonstrate that, according to his experience, here was gross exaggeration indeed.

Euphues shows better knowledge of the heart of woman when, continuing his analysis of women's foibles, he comes to give his friend information that teaches him in fact rather how to be loved than how to cease loving: "Yet if thou be so weake being bewitched with their wiles that thou hast neither will to eschue nor wit to avoyd their company ... yet at the hearte dissemble thy griefe ... cary two faces in one hood, cover thy flaming fancie with fained ashes ... let thy hewe be merry when thy heart is melancholy, beare a pleasaunt countenaunce with a pined conscience.... Love creepeth in by stealth, and by stealth slideth away. If she breake promise with thee in the night, or absent hir selfe in the day, seeme thou carelesse, and and then will she be carefull; if thou languish [i.e., becomest slack in thy suit], then wil she be lavish of hir honour, yea and of the other strange beast her honestie."

He continues in this bitter vein, avenging, as it seems, his private wrongs, and vowing never, as far as he is himself concerned to have anything more to do with women. From them, he is naturally led to think of children who form an equally good theme on which to moralise. He does not fail in this duty, and writes for the good of his friend, and of the public at large, a little treatise very much in the style of some of Pamela's letters,[87] where we are taught how "Ephoebus," the child that is to be, should be brought up. Ephoebus is the Emile of this sixteenth-century Rousseau. Always thorough and exact, Lyly is careful to begin at the beginning, informing us at first "that the childe shoulde be true borne and no bastarde."[88]

Then he comes to the bringing up of the boy, and with as much earnestness as Jean-Jacques, and with true and moving eloquence, he beseeches the mother to be the nurse of her own progeny. "It is most necessary and most naturall in mine opinion, that the mother of the childe be also the nurse, both for the entire love she beareth to the babe, and the great desire she hath to have it well nourished: for is there any one more meete to bring up the infant than she that bore it? or will any be carefull for it, as she that bredde it?... Is the earth called the mother of all things onely bicause it bringeth forth? No, but bicause it nourisheth those things that springe out of it. Whatsoever is bred in ye sea is fed in the sea; no plant, no tree, no hearbe commeth out of the ground that is not moystened, and as it were noursed of the moysture and mylke of the earth; the lyonesse nurseth hir whelps, the raven cherisheth hir byrdes, the viper her broode, and shal a woman cast away her babe?

"I accompt it cast away which in the swath clouts is cast aside, and lyttle care can the mother have which can suffer such crueltie: and can it be tearmed with any other title then cruelty, the infant yet looking redde of the mother, the mother yet breathing through the torments of hir travaile, the child crying for helpe which is said to move wilde beastes, even in the selfe said moment it is borne, or the nexte minute, to deliver to a straunge nurse, which perhappes is neither wholesome in body, neither honest in manners, whiche esteemeth more thy argent though a trifle, then thy tender infant, thy greatest treasure?" Here Lyly is at his best, and neither Richardson nor Rousseau spoke better on this point, which is one of their favourite subjects.

He goes on to show how his child should be brought up, with what principles he should be imbued; many of these principles again very much resembling those Rousseau was to accept and propagate two hundred years later: "It is good nurture that leadeth to virtue, and discreete demeanour that playneth the path to felicitie.... To be a noble man it is most excellent, but that is our ancestors ... as for our nobilytie, our stocke, our kindred, and whatsoever we ourselves have not done I scarcely accompt ours.... It is vertue, yea vertue, gentlemen, that maketh gentlemen.... These things [i.e., knowledge, reason, good sense], neither the whirling wheele of Fortune can chaunge neither the deceitful cavilling of worldlings separate, neither sickenesse abate, neither age abolish." Then follows a dialogue between Euphues and an atheist,[89] in which I need not say the latter is utterly routed; and the book ends with a collection of letters[90] between Euphues and various people who ask and get his advice on their difficulties, oracle-wise, Pamela-wise too.

In the second part of his romance, which appeared in 1580,[91] Lyly gives a kind of Lettres persanes, but Lettres persanes reversed, Montesquieu making use of his foreigner to satirize France, and Lyly of his to eulogize his native land. Euphues comes to England with his friend Philautus, and, since he knows everything, instructs the latter as they go along. He warns him against wine, gambling, and debauchery, teaches him geography, and points out to him what is worth seeing. Philautus does not retort that Euphues is a pedant, which proves him to be very good tempered and a perfect travelling companion. The two friends are enchanted with the country: its natural products, its commerce, its agriculture, its inhabitants and their manners, its bishops and their flocks, the civil government, the religious government, everything is perfect. English gentlewomen are prodigies of wisdom and beauty; and indeed that is the least Lyly can say of them, since it is for them that he is writing. When he spoke, as we have seen, disparagingly of women, he meant Italian women (none of whom, as a matter of fact, he had ever known or even seen), not Englishwomen. These spend their mornings "in devout prayer," and not in bed like the ladies of Italy; they read the Scriptures instead of Ariosto and Petrarch; they are so beautiful that the traveller is enraptured and cannot help crying out: "There is no beauty but in England." To sum up, "they are in prayer devoute, in bravery humble, in beautie chast, in feasting temperate, in affection wise, in mirth modest, in all their actions though courtlye, bicause woemen, yet Aungels, bicause virtuous." As for the women of other countries, they all have lovers and spend their time in painting their faces.[92]

Having verified such important differences, Philautus cannot do less than find a wife in England, and Euphues, whose unsociable humour prevents his doing likewise, carries away with him into his native land the remembrance of "a place, in my opinion (if any such may be on the earth) not inferiour to a paradise," and of a Queen "of singuler beautie and chastitie, excelling in the one Venus, in the other Vesta."

It is, however, appropriate to recollect that at the time of the Renaissance, before the blossoming in England of this literature for ladies, Caxton too had enumerated the chief qualities of the women of his country. They are the same as in Lyly, only, as we shall see, the honest printer closes his remarks with a slight reservation. In the preface placed at the beginning of a work translated from the French by Lord Rivers, he states that in the translation, several passages reflecting on the female sex were suppressed; that is easily understood; they would have no application in England; "for I wote wel," says he, "of whatsomever condicion women ben in Grece, the women of this contre ben right good, wyse, playsant, humble, discrete, sobre, chast, obedient to their husbandis, trewe, secrete, stedfast, ever besy and never ydle, attemperat in speking and vertuous in all their werkis"—"or," he is fain to add, "atte leste sholde be soo."[93] And thereupon, Caxton, on his own authority, restores the suppressed passages.

From the particular point of view of the historian of the English novel, Lyly with all his absurdities had yet one merit which must be taken into account. With him we leave epic and chivalrous stories and approach the novel of manners. There is no longer question of Arthur and his marvellous knights, but rather of contemporary men, who, in spite of excessive oratorical gew-gaws, possess some resemblance to reality. Conversations are reported in which we find the tone of well-born persons of the period. Lyly takes care also to be very exact in his dates. Having announced at the end of his first volume that Euphues was about to set out for England, he informs us in the beginning of the second, which appeared in 1580, that the embarkation took place on December 1, 1579. He would, for anything, have gone so far as to give an engraved portrait of his hero, just as we were to see later, at the beginning of a book destined to make some noise in the world, the portrait of "Captain Lemuel Gulliver of Redriff." Undoubtedly his opinions on men and life, his analysis of sentiment, are rather clumsily blended with the story and savour of the awkwardness of a first attempt; but there was however merit in making the attempt, and it is not impossible at distant intervals to discover under the crust of pedantry some well-turned passage, possessing eloquence, as we have seen, or, more rarely, a sort of humour. It is thus that a tolerably good lesson may be drawn from the adventures of Philautus in London, who, deeply smitten with the charms of a young English lady, consults a sorcerer in order to obtain a philtre that will inspire love. Here was an excellent opportunity, which the magician does not fail to seize, of talking about serpents and toads. But, after a long enumeration of the bones, stones, and livers of animals that cause love, the alchemist, urged by Philautus, ends by confessing that the best sorcery of all to gain the loving regard of a woman, is to be handsome, witty, and charming.

IV.

By his defects and his merits, his wisdom, his gracefulness and also his bad style, Lyly could not fail to please. His public was ready when he began writing, a public with many frivolous tastes and many serious instincts. The lightness of tone and of behaviour which struck a foreigner coming for the first time to the English court or a professional censor who by trade is meant to see nothing else, was misleading as showing only the surface of the sort of mankind that was flourishing there at that time. This lightness of tone, however, did exist nevertheless, and those who assumed it were not slow to embellish their speeches with flowers from Lyly's paper garden. The austere French Huguenot, Hubert Languet, the friend and adviser of Sir Philip Sidney, who visited England in the very year "Euphues" was published, was very much astonished to see how English courtiers behaved themselves; accustomed as he was to the grave talk he enjoyed with his young friend, he had imagined, it seems, that no other was relished by him or by anybody in Queen Elizabeth's palaces. When he left the country he wrote to Sidney his opinion of the manners he had observed. It is simply a confirmation of what Ascham had stated sometime before, when he wrote of his travelled compatriots: neither of them did justice to the more serious qualities hidden under all this courtly trifling: "It was a delight to me last winter," says Languet, "to see you high in favour and enjoying the esteem of all your countrymen; but to speak plainly, the habits of your court seemed to me somewhat less manly than I could have wished, and most of your noblemen appeared to me to seek for a reputation more by a kind of affected courtesy than by those virtues which are wholesome to the State, and which are most becoming to generous spirits and to men of high birth. I was sorry therefore, and so were other friends of yours, to see you wasting the flower of your life on such things, and I feared lest that noble nature of yours should be brought to take pleasure in pursuits which only enervate the mind."[94]

Lyly's book proved well suited to this public; it went through numerous editions; it was printed five times during the first six years of its publication, and new editions were issued from time to time till 1636. It gave birth, as we shall see, to many imitations; the name of Euphues on the title-page of a novel was for years considered a safe conduct to the public, if not to posterity; books purporting to be Euphues' legacies or copies of Euphues' papers, or bearing in some way or other the stamp of his supposed approbation, multiplied accordingly. The movement increased rapidly, but it was not to last long; in fact, it did not continue beyond ten or twelve years; after this time the monuments of the euphuistic literature were still reprinted, but no addition was made to their number.

This period, however, was filled in a measure with the product of Lyly's brains or that of his imitators. All who prided themselves on elegance spoke his affected language, and studied in his book the mythology of plants. Edward Blount, a bookseller who reprinted Lyly's comedies in the following century, at a time when these courtly dramas were beginning to be forgotten, has well expressed the kindly and sympathetic favour accorded to Lyly by the ladies of Elizabethan days: "These papers of his," says he, "lay like dead lawrels in a churchyard; but I have gathered the scattered branches up, and by a charme, gotten from Apollo, made them greene againe and set them up as epitaphes to his memory. A sinne it were to suffer these rare monuments of wit to lye covered in dust and a shame such conceipted comedies should be acted by none but wormes. Oblivion shall not so trample on a sonne of the Muses; and such a sonne as they called their darling. Our nation are in his debt for a new English which he taught them. 'Euphues and his England' began first that language; all our ladyes were then his schollers; and that beautie in court, which could not parley eupheueisme was as little regarded, as shee which now there speakes not French."[95] It may be appropriately recalled here that this same Blount who thus eulogizes Lyly had published already another set of Elizabethan dramas, and a much more important one, viz., the first folio of Shakespeare in 1623.

Those comedies which Blount thought fit to reprint, considering that in so doing he was presenting to his readers "a Lilly growing in a grove of lawrels," are another proof of the success Lyly had, through his novel, secured for himself at court. His plays are mythological or pseudo-historical dramas, interspersed with some pretty songs and dialogues, and were performed by children before the Queen on holy-days. Among others were his "Campaspe," "played before the Queenes Majestie, on new yeares day at night, by Her Majesties children and the children of Paules," 1584; his "Sapho and Phao," performed also before the Queen by the same children, on Shrove Tuesday, 1584; his "Endimion, the man in the moone," played before the Queen "at Greenwich on Candlemass day at night, by the chyldren of Paules"; "Gallathea," played on New Year's Day; "Midas," performed on Twelfth Night, also before the Queen, &c.[96]

On love matters and women's affairs, he was considered an authority; the analysis of the passions and the knowledge of the deeper moods of the soul, which many consider to be, among novelists, a new-born science, were regarded by his contemporaries as a thing wholly his, a discovery made by himself; not foreseeing his successors, they proclaimed him a master of his newly invented art. Beginners would come to him for advice or for a preface, as they go now to the heirs of his art, especially when love is their theme. In this way Thomas Watson published in 1582 his "Passionate Centurie of Love," and prefaced it, as with a certificate of its worth, by a letter from Lyly: "My good friend, I have read your new passions, and they have renewed mine old pleasures, the which brought to me no lesse delight, then they have done to yourself commendations.... Such is the nature of persuading pleasure, that it melteth the marrow before it scorch the skin ... not unlike unto the oyle of jeat which rotteth the bone and never rankleth the flesh."[97]

It was useless for wise minds to grumble; Lyly always found women to applaud him. In vain did Nash, twelve years after the appearance of "Euphues," scoff at the enthusiasm with which he had read the book when he was "a little ape in Cambridge";[98] vainly was Euphuism derided on the stage before a Cambridge audience: "There is a beaste in India call'd a polecatt ... and the further she is from you the less you smell her," a piece of information that contains more probability than perhaps any given by Lyly.[99] Vainly, too, Shakespeare showed his opinion of the style in lending it to Falstaff when the worthy knight wishes to admonish Prince Henry in the manner of courts. Grown old in his tavern, Falstaff has no idea that these refinements, fashionable at the time when he was as slender as his page, may be now the jest of the young generation: "There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of, and it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch: this pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile; so doth the company thou keepest: for, Harry, now I do not speak to thee in drink, but in tears; not in pleasure, but in passion; not in words only, but in woes also."[100]

Many persons to whom the book doubtless recalled the memory of their spring-time, shared Falstaff's ingenuousness, and remained faithful to Lyly; if men or letters, after some years of enthusiasm, ceased to imitate him, his book was for a long time continuously read, and it was reprinted again and again even in the reign of Charles I. It was translated into Dutch in the same century,[101] and was modernized in the following, under the title: "The false friend and the inconstant mistress: an instructive novel ... displaying the artifices of the female sex in their amours."[102] High praise is rendered by the editor to Lyly, who "was a great refiner of the English tongue in those days." The book appeared not very long before Richardson's "Pamela," a fact worthy of notice, the more so as in this abbreviation of Euphues, the letters contained in the original have been reproduced and look the more conspicuous in the little pamphlet. Quite Richardsonian, too, is the table of contents which is rather a table of good precepts and useful information, a very different table from the one appended by Harington to his "Ariosto." Here we find enumerated the many wise recommendations by which Lyly so long anticipated Richardson and Rousseau:

"The mother ought to be her own nurse p. 83.

"The wild beasts more tender of their young than those who nurse not their own children p. 83.

"Children not to be frightened with stories of spirits and bugbears (&c.) p. 86."

So much for the continuation of Lyly's fame. As for the period of imitation proper, the era of euphuism's full glory, it lasted, as we have said, hardly more than twelve or at most fifteen years. But it saw the birth of works that are not without importance in the history of the origin of the novel in this country.



FOOTNOTES:

[67] "'Euphues' the anatomy of wyt ... wherin are contained the delights that wyt followeth in his youth by the pleasauntnesse of Love, and the happynesse he reapeth in age by the perfectnesse of wisedome"; London [1579], 4to; reprinted by Arber, London, 1869. Lyly was born in 1553 or 1554; he died in 1606.

[68] Dedication of the second part: "To the Ladies and Gentlewoemen of England." There is afterwards a sort of second preface addressed to the "Gentlemen readers," but Lyly puts into it much less animation, and appears to have written it only for conscience' sake in order not to forget any one.

[69] In his excellent work, "Shakspere and Euphuism," Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, 1884, Dr. Landmann was the first to break up Lyly's style into its different parts, and point out the true sources where he found not only the elements of his language, but even many of his ideas. The same essay contains very useful information on Gongorism and other kinds of affected styles of the sixteenth century. See also Dr. Landmann's "Der Euphuismus," Giessen, 1881; his edition of part of "Euphues," Heilbronn, 1887; and an article by Mr. S. L. Lee, Athenaeum, July 14, 1883.