his stiffness relaxes, and he warms into flowing strains of solemn melody. The majority of our quotations are favourable examples of his rhythm. The opening sentence of the Polity (p. 219)— Though for no other cause, yet for this," &c.—is a fine example of a crescendo effect. The first sentence of his paragraph on the angels-" But now that we may lift up our eyes (as it were) from the footstool to the throne of God," &c.-has something of the movement of the sentence in Sir Thomas Browne's 'Hydriotaphia' that drew such exclamations of delight from De Quincey. The great cause of clumsiness in his general rhythm is an excessive use of heavy relative constructions:— 66 "That which hitherto we have set down is (I hope) sufficient to show their brutishness which imagine that religion and virtue are only as men will account of them." "Of what account the Master of Sentences was in the Church of Rome, the same and more amongst the preachers of Reformed Churches Calvin had purchased; so that the perfectest divines were judged they which were skilfullest in Calvin's writings. Till at length the discipline, which was at the first so weak, that without the staff of their approbation, who were not subject unto it themselves, it had not brought others under subjection, began now to challenge universal obedience, and to enter into open conflict with those very churches, which in desperate extremity had been relievers of it." Even these passages are not without a certain musical charm, especially if we disregard the meaning and attend only to the succession of the syllables. KINDS OF COMPOSITION. Exposition.-Hooker's powers of exposition are tested by the book on Law, his most abstruse subject. Viewed simply as a piece of exposition, this book contains little to profit the student. In this particular respect, it is bad even by the standard of the time. Its main faults have been specified under the Paragraph and the quality of Clearness. The paragraph on the discovery of rules of action, quoted to illustrate his worst, is a piece of very confused writing. On a subject requiring closeness of thought, he has not the qualities that made up for bad method in some of his contemporaries; he has neither felicity nor variety of expres sion, nor fulness of example and illustration. These remarks apply chiefly to the First Book: his imperfect expression is most apparent there. In his arguments on ritual and doctrine he is more on beaten ground, and proceeds with less confusion. Persuasion. The Ecclesiastical Polity' is said to have had great influence. It is a good example to show how much in persuasion depends upon the manner. Hooker added little or nothing to what Whitgift had urged against the Presbyterian champion, Cartwright; and in clearness, terseness of expression, and logical force, is far inferior to his patron. His main contribution is his elaborate and (in a logical point of view) clumsy attempt to prove what Whitgift had simply asserted or taken for granted, that not everything required for the conduct of human affairs is to be found in Scripture. His arguments in the first two Books had little weight with the Puritans. Once they saw his drift, they admitted the general propositions, but questioned his implied conclusions. Law was a good thing, and should be obeyed, but not bad law; not everything was found in Scripture-but the Presbyterian gov ernment, and their views about liturgies, vestments, and sacraments, were found in Scripture. While Hooker's arguments were neither new nor convincing, his moderation, singular in that age, gained him a hearing, and his earnest advocacy of the blessings of union and order was like oil on the troubled waters. Whitgift's strenuous hostility and unsparing rigour of argument set his opponents on edge, and steeled them against conviction; Hooker's niild and occasionally hazy statement of the same arguments won the doubtful at once, and by degrees made friends out of decided enemies. JOHN LYLY or LILLIE, 1554-1606. This ingenious writer deserves a place of minor prominence in a history of prose-partly from the intrinsic merits of his style, and partly from the voluminous controversy that has been raised upon it. He is generally known as "The Euphuist," and his style is called Euphuism. We shall analyse this Euphuism, and try to make out what it is, where its elements came from, and what influence it had upon its age as a model of composition. Few particulars of Lyly's life are on record. We know only that he was born in Kent, that he was a student at Magdalen, Oxford, that he was patronised by Lord Burghley, and that from 1577 to 1593 he was a hanger-on at Court and wrote plays. His plays had no small reputation, coming immediately before Shakspeare. Ben Jonson gives him honourable mention; and, in a bookseller's puff of the next generation, he is described as "the only rare poet of that time, the witty, comical, facetiously quick and unparalleled John Lilly, Master of Arts." His chief work in prose, apart from prose dramas and some assistance to Tom Nash in the Marprelate controversy, is a moral romance known as Euphues' (whence his name Euphuist). It is in two parts, 'Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit' (1579), and 'Euphues and his England' (1580). Euphues, a gay young Athenian of good family, travels in the first part to Naples, in the second part to England; the plot is subservient to the development of the young man's moral nature, and gives occasion for discourses on religion, educa tion, friendship, and other virtues, with a great many love-passages. The book suited the taste of the time, and was popular: according to Blount the bookseller, "all our Ladies were then his Scholars; and that Beauty in Court which could not parley Euphuism was as little regarded as she which now" (1632) "speaks not French." With all his popularity the ingenious, gentle, humorous little man received no solid patronage. There are extant two petitions of his to the Queen complaining of his deferred hopes of favour. He had hung on for thirteen years in hopes of getting the Mastership of the Revels; and in his second petition (1593), despairing of this, he begs "Some land, some good fines, or forfeitures that should fall by the just fall of these inost false traitors, that seeing nothing will come by the Revels, I may prey upon the Rebels. Thirteen years your Highness' servant, but yet nothing. Twenty friends that though they say they will be sure I find them sure to be slow. A thousand hopes but all nothing; a hundred promises but yet nothing. Thus casting up the inventory of my friends, hopes, promises, and times, the summa totalis amounteth to just nothing. My last will is shorter than mine invention: but three legacies, patience to my creditors, melancholy without measure to my friends, and beggary without shame to my family." What were his fortunes after this, whether Elizabeth heard his petition, is not known. Probably the frugal Queen gave him some relief. His admiring bookseller says, though without express reference to the petition, that he was heard, graced, and rewarded." He died at the comparatively early age of fifty-two. The interest in Lyly was revived in this century by Sir Walter Scott's attempt to reproduce a Euphuist in the person of Sir Piercie Shafton. In the heat of attacking and defending Lyly and his style, of arguing as to whether he invented Euphuism or only fell in with a ruling taste, whether he vitiated our language or caught a taint, the disputants have not always kept in view what peculiarly belongs to Lyly's mannerism and what does not. His style has good points and bad points, peculiar affectations and affectations common to the age. A discussion on Euphuism becomes hopelessly tangled and complicated unless the leading elements of his manner are kept distinct. Here it may be well, without pretending to give an exhaustive analysis, to distinguish some particulars that should not be confused. Three or four may be specified. (1.) Neatness and finish of sentence.-Lyly's sentences are remarkably free from intricacy and inversion, much shorter, more pithy and direct than was usual. We must come down at least a century before we find a structure so lucid. To be sure, his matter was not heavy, and did not tempt him to use either weighty sentences or learned terms: still, credit to whom credit is due; his sentences, as sentences, though not in perfect modern form, are the most smooth and finished of that time. His chief fault is the want of variety, "an eternal affectation of sententiousness," says an old critic, "keeps to such a formal measure of his periods as soon grows tiresome, and so by confining himself to shape his sense so frequently into one artificial cadence, however ingenious or harmonious, abridges that variety which the style should be admired for." (2.) Fanciful antithesis and word-play.-The passage above quoted from his petition to Elizabeth is an extreme example. In the Euphues' there are few passages so fantastically antithetical; the antithesis of the 'Euphues' is more a kind of balance in the clauses, with or without opposition in the matter. Thus, when young Euphues is counselled by aged Philautus, he replies: "Father and friend (your age showeth the one, your honesty the other), I am neither so suspicious to mistrust your goodwill, nor so sottish to mislike your good counsel. As I am therefore to thank you for the first, so it stands upon me to think better on the latter. I mean not to cavil with you as one loving sophistry: neither to control you, as one having superiority; the one would bring my talk into the suspicion of fraud, the other convince me of folly." When Euphues rejects the good advice, Lyly moralises thus: "Here ye may behold, Gentlemen, how lewdly wit standeth in his own light, how he deemeth no penny good silver but his own, preferring the blossom before the fruit, the bud before the flower, the green blade before the ripe ear of corn, his own wit before all men's wisdoms. Neither is that reason, seeing for the most part it is proper to all those of sharp capacity to esteem of themselves as most proper: if one be hard in conceiving, they pronounce him a dolt; if given to study, they proclaim him a dunce: if merry, a jester: if sad, a saint: if full of words, a sot: if without speech, a cipher. If one argue with them boldly, then he is impudent: if coldly, an innocent: if there be reasoning of divinity, they cry, Quæ supra nos, nihil ad nos; if of humanity, sententias loquitur carnifex.' Lyly did not invent this measured balance: like Johnson, he only took up, trimmed, and carried to excess a structure that others used in a rougher form and less frequently. A more measured, neat, pointed, and ornate style of prose was imported from Italy in Henry VIII.'s reign by scholars and travelled men of fashion (p. 189). It appears in our literature long before Lyly. It would seem to have been encouraged by Elizabeth.1 We see how Lyly strained his wit to gain her favour; and in 1567, a quarter of a 1 An able monograph by Herr F. Landmann (Der Euphuismus, Giefsen, Keller, 1881) traces Lyly's Euphuism' back to Antonio de Guevara's Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius' (see ante, p. 198). Of this Spanish prose romance Herr Landmann regards Euphues' as an imitation both in matter. and in manner. This is so far true: still Lyly's "Euphuism" has distinction enough to deserve credit as something more than an imitation-as a marked variety in a peculiar kind. century before, we find Roger Ascham exerting himself as follows. The letter is addressed to Elizabeth, though she is in the third person, and it has the same object as Lyly's petition :— "I wrote once a little book of shooting: King HENRY, her most noble father, did so well like and allow it, as he gave me a living for it; when he lost his life I lost my living; but noble King Edward again did first revive it by his goodness, then did increase it by his liberality; thirdly, did confirm it by his authority under the great seal of England, which patent all this time was both a great pleasure and profit to me, saving that one unpleasant word in that patent, called during pleasure,' turned me after to great displeasure; for when King EDWARD went, his pleasure went with him, and my whole living went away with them both.' Here we have the same striving at verbal conceits-differing from Lyly's only in being less ingenious and polished. Lyly, it is clear, cannot be charged either with inventing this affectation or with introducing it to Court. X (3.) Excess of similitudes, parallels, and instances.—This is the most striking part of Lyly's mannerism. It is for this that he is censured by Sidney, and accused of "rifling up all Herbarists, all stories of beasts, fowls, and fishes." To the same effect he is attacked by Michael Drayton: while Sidney is praised because he "Did first reduce Our tongue from Lillie's writing then in use; Not only does Lyly ransack natural history for comparisons, he even goes the length of inventing natural history; at least, whether he is the inventor or not, many of his comparisons refer to fabulous properties. The following are examples. Take first "Euphues to the Gentlemen Scholars of Athens." "The merchant that travelleth for gain, the husbandman that toileth for increase, the lawyer that pleadeth for gold, the craftsman that seeketh to live by his labour-all these, after they have fatted themselves with sufficient, either take their ease, or less pain than they were accustomed. Hippomanes ceased to run when he had gotten the goal. Hercules to labour when he had obtained the victory. Mercury to pipe when he had cast Argus in a slumber. The ant, though she toil in summer, yet in winter she leaveth to travail. The bee, though she delight to suck the fair flower, yet is she at last cloyed with honey. The spider that weaveth the finest thread ceaseth at the last when she hath finished her web. But in the action and study of the mind (Gentlemen) it is far otherwise, for he that tasteth the sweet of learning endureth all the sour of labour. He that seeketh the depth of knowledge, is as it were in a Labyrinth, in the which the farther he goeth, the farther he is from the end: or like the bird in the lime-bush, which, the more she striveth to get out, the faster she sticketh in. And certainly it may be said of learning as it was feigned of Nectar, the drink of the Gods, the which the more it was drunk, the more it would overflow the brim of the cup; neither is it far unlike the |