hors borrowed from a kind of fabulous natural history. "Descend
into thine own conscience and consider with thyself the great
difference between staring and stark-blind, wit and wisdom, love and
lust; be merry, but with modesty; be sober, but not too sullen; {81} be
valiant, but not too venturous." "I see now that, as the fish
_Scolopidus_ in the flood _Araxes_ at the waxing of the moon is as
white as the driven snow, and at the waning as black as the burnt coal;
so Euphues, which at the first increasing of our familiarity was very
zealous, is now at the last cast become most faithless." Besides the
fish _Scolopidus_, the favorite animals of Lyly's menagerie are such as
the chameleon, which, "though he have most guts draweth least breath;"
the bird _Piralis_, "which sitting upon white cloth is white, upon
green, green;" and the serpent _Porphirius_, which, "though he be full
of poison, yet having no teeth, hurteth none but himself."

Lyly's style was pithy and sententious, and his sentences have the air
of proverbs or epigrams. The vice of Euphuism was its monotony. On
every page of the book there was something pungent, something quotable;
but many pages of such writing became tiresome. Yet it did much to
form the hitherto loose structure of English prose, by lending it point
and polish. His carefully balanced periods were valuable lessons in
rhetoric, and his book became a manual of polite conversation and
introduced that fashion of witty repartee, which is evident enough in
Shakspere's comic dialogue. In 1580 appeared the second part, _Euphues
and his England_, and six editions of the whole work were printed
before 1598. Lyly had many imitators. In Stephen Gosson's _School
{82} of Abuse_, a tract directed against the stage and published about
four months later than the first part of Euphues, the language is
distinctly Euphuistic. The dramatist, Robert Greene, published, in
1587, his _Menaphon; Camilla's Alarum to Slumbering Euphues_, and his
_Euphues's Censure to Philautus_. His brother dramatist, Thomas Lodge,
published; in 1590, _Rosalynde: Euphues's Golden Legacy_, from which
Shakspere took the plot of _As You Like It_. Shakspere and Ben Jonson
both quote from _Euphues_ in their plays, and Shakspere was really
writing Euphuism, when he wrote such a sentence as "Tis true, 'tis
pity; pity 'tis 'tis true."

That knightly gentleman, Philip Sidney, was a true type of the lofty
aspiration and manifold activ