d the French tale-tellers,
contemporary, or of times more or less earlier.

For some time, as almost everybody knows, these collections of
translated matter served a purpose--great indeed, but somewhat outside
their proper department--by furnishing the Elizabethan dramatists with a
large part--perhaps the larger part--of their subjects. But they very
soon began to exercise it directly by suggesting the fictitious part of
the prose pamphlet--a department which, though infinitely less well
known than the plays, and still not very easy to know, holds almost the
second position as representing the popular literature of the
Elizabethan time. And they also had--in one case certainly, in the other
probably--no little influence upon the two great Elizabethan works which
in a manner founded the modern novel and the modern romance in
English--the _Euphues_ of Lyly and the _Arcadia_ of Sir Philip Sidney.

The pamphlet stories (which are themselves often play-connected, as in
the case of Lodge's _Rosalynde_ and Greene's _Pandosto_) do not require
much notice, with one exception--Nash's _Jack Wilton or the Unfortunate
Traveller_, to which some have assigned a position equal, or perhaps
superior in our particular subject, to that of the _Arcadia_ or that of
_Euphues_. This seems to the present writer a mistake: but as to appear
important is (in a not wholly unreal sense) to be so, the piece shall be
separately considered. The rest are mostly marred by a superabundance of
rather rudimentary art, and a very poor allowance of matter. There is
hardly any character, and except in a few pieces, such as Lodge's
_Margarite of America_, there is little attempt to utilise new scenes
and conditions. But the whole class has special interest for us in one
peculiarity which makes it perhaps unreadable to any but students, and
that is its saturation with the Elizabethan conceit and word-play which
is sometimes called Euphuism. Nor is this wonderful, considering that
more than one of these "pamphlets" is directly connected with the matter
and the personages of _Euphues_ itself. To this famous book, therefore,
we had better turn.

Some people, it is believed, have denied that _Euphues_ is a novel at
all; and some of these some have been almost indignant at its being
called one. It is certainly, with _Rasselas_, the most remarkable
example, in English, of a novel which is to a great extent deprived of
the _agremens_ to which we have for some two cen