nd weighty morals,
and is indeed a collection of essays on education, on friendship, on
religion and philosophy, and on the favourite occupation and curriculum
of Elizabethan youth--foreign travel. The fashions and customs of his
countrymen which he condemns in the course of his teaching are the same
as those inveighed against by Stubbs and other contemporaries. He
disliked manners and fashions copied from Italy; particularly he
disliked the extravagant fashions of women. One woman only escapes his
censure, and she, of course, is the Queen, whom Euphues and his
companion in the book come to England to see. In the main the teaching
of Euphues inculcates a humane and liberal, if not very profound creed,
and the book shares with _The Fairy Queen_ the honour of the earlier
Puritanism--the Puritanism that besides the New Testament had the
_Republic_.

But Euphues, though he was in his time the popular idol, was not long in
finding a successful rival. Seven years before his death Sir Philip
Sidney, in a period of retirement from the Court wrote "_The Countess of
Pembroke's Arcadia_"; it was published ten years after it had been
composed. The _Arcadia_ is the first English example of the prose
pastoral romance, as the _Shepherd's Calendar_ is of our pastoral verse.
Imitative essays in its style kept appearing for two hundred years after
it, till Wordsworth and other poets who knew the country drove its
unrealities out of literature. The aim of it and of the school to which
it belonged abroad was to find a setting for a story which should leave
the author perfectly free to plant in it any improbability he liked, and
to do what he liked with the relations of his characters. In the shade
of beech trees, the coils of elaborated and intricate love-making wind
and unravel themselves through an endless afternoon. In that art nothing
is too far-fetched, nothing too sentimental, no sorrow too unreal. The
pastoral romance was used, too, to cover other things besides a
sentimental and decorative treatment of love. Authors wrapped up as
shepherds their political friends and enemies, and the pastoral eclogues
in verse which Spenser and others composed are full of personal and
political allusion. Sidney's story carries no politics and he depends
for its interest solely on the wealth of differing episodes and the
stories and arguments of love which it contains. The story would furnish
plot enough for twenty ordinary novels, but probably thos