ons and nereids; the pages of the
family were converted into wood-nymphs, who peeped from every bower;
and the footmen gamboled over the lawns in the figure of satyrs. When
her majesty hunted in the park she was met by Diana who, pronouncing
our royal prude to be the brightest paragon of unspotted chastity,
invited her to groves free from the intrusions of Acteon." The most
elaborate of these entertainments of which we have any notice, were,
perhaps, the games celebrated in her honor by the Earl of Leicester,
when she visited him at Kenilworth, in 1575. An account of these was
published by a contemporary poet, George Gascoigne, _The Princely
Pleasures at the Court of Kenilworth_, and Walter Scott has made them
familiar to modern readers in his novel of _Kenilworth_. Sidney was
present on this occasion, and, perhaps, Shakspere, then a boy of
eleven, and living at Stratford, not far off, may have been taken to
see the spectacle, may have seen Neptune, riding on the back of a huge
dolphin in the castle lake, speak the copy of verses in which he
offered his trident to the empress of the sea, and may have

"heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back,
Utter such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at the sound."

{80} But in considering the literature of Elisabeth's reign it will be
convenient to speak first of the prose. While following up Spenser's
career to its close (1599), we have, for the sake of unity of
treatment, anticipated somewhat the literary history of the twenty
years preceding. In 1579 appeared a book which had a remarkable
influence on English prose. This was John Lyly's _Euphues, the Anatomy
of Wit_. It was in form a romance, the history of a young Athenian who
went to Naples to see the world and get an education; but it is in
substance nothing but a series of dialogues on love, friendship,
religion, etc., written in language which, from the title of the book,
has received the name of _Euphuism_. This new English became very
fashionable among the ladies, and "that beauty in court which could not
parley Euphuism," says a writer of 1632, "was as little regarded as she
which now there speaks not French."

Walter Scott introduced a Euphuist into his novel the _Monastery_, but
the peculiar jargon which Sir Piercie Shafton is made to talk is not at
all like the real Euphuism. That consisted of antithesis,
alliteration, and the profuse illustration of every thought by
metap