years. When it
again came before the public it was introduced as 'a great
bibliographical rarity.' Its fatal old-fashionedness hangs like a
millstone about its neck. In the poems of Chaucer and the dramas of
Shakespeare are a thousand touches which make the reader feel that
Chaucer and Shakespeare are his contemporaries, that they have written
in his own time, and published but yesterday. Read _Euphues_, and you
will say to yourself, 'That book must have been written three hundred
years ago, and it looks its age.' Yet it has its virtues. One may not
say of it, as Johnson said of the _Rehearsal_, that it 'has not wit
enough to keep it sweet.' Neither may he, upon second thought,
conclude that 'it has not vitality enough to preserve it from
putrefaction.' It has, indeed, a bottom of good sense; and so had
Malvolio. It is filled from end to beginning with wit, or with what
passed for wit among many readers of that day. Often the wit is of a
tawdry and spectacular sort,--mere verbal wit, the use of a given word
not because it is the best word, the most fitting word, but because
the author wants a word beginning with the letter G, or the letter M,
or the letter F, as the case may be. On the second page of Greene's
_Arbasto_ is this sentence: 'He did not so much as vouchsafe to give
an _eare_ to my _parle_, or an _eye_ to my _person_.' Greene learned
this trick from Lyly, who was a master of the art. The sentence
represents one of the common forms in _Euphues_, such as this: 'To the
stomach _quatted_ with _dainties_ all _delicates_ seem _queasie_.'
Sometimes the balance is preserved by three words on a side. For
example, the companions whom Euphues found in Naples practiced arts
'whereby they might either _soake_ his _purse_ to reape _commodotie_,
or _sooth_ his _person_ to winne _credite_.' Other illustrations are
these: I can neither '_remember_ our _miseries_ without _griefe_, nor
_redresse_ our _mishaps_ without _grones_.' 'If the _wasting_ of our
_money_ might not _dehort_ us, yet the _wounding_ of our _mindes_
should _deterre_ us.' This next sentence, with its combination of K
sounds, clatters like a pair of castanets: 'Though Curio bee as hot as
a toast, yet Euphues is as cold as a clocke, though hee bee a cocke of
the game, yet Euphues is content to bee craven and crye creake.'

Excess of alliteration is the most obvious feature of Lyly's style.
That style has been carefully analyzed by those who are learned in
such