er
as they go along. He warns him against wine, gambling, and debauchery,
teaches him geography, and points out to him what is worth seeing.
Philautus does not retort that Euphues is a pedant, which proves him to
be very good tempered and a perfect travelling companion. The two
friends are enchanted with the country: its natural products, its
commerce, its agriculture, its inhabitants and their manners, its
bishops and their flocks, the civil government, the religious
government, everything is perfect. English gentlewomen are prodigies of
wisdom and beauty; and indeed that is the least Lyly can say of them,
since it is for them that he is writing. When he spoke, as we have seen,
disparagingly of women, he meant Italian women (none of whom, as a
matter of fact, he had ever known or even seen), not Englishwomen. These
spend their mornings "in devout prayer," and not in bed like the ladies
of Italy; they read the Scriptures instead of Ariosto and Petrarch; they
are so beautiful that the traveller is enraptured and cannot help crying
out: "There is no beauty but in England." To sum up, "they are in prayer
devoute, in bravery humble, in beautie chast, in feasting temperate, in
affection wise, in mirth modest, in all their actions though courtlye,
bicause woemen, yet Aungels, bicause virtuous." As for the women of
other countries, they all have lovers and spend their time in painting
their faces.[92]

Having verified such important differences, Philautus cannot do less
than find a wife in England, and Euphues, whose unsociable humour
prevents his doing likewise, carries away with him into his native land
the remembrance of "a place, in my opinion (if any such may be on the
earth) not inferiour to a paradise," and of a Queen "of singuler beautie
and chastitie, excelling in the one Venus, in the other Vesta."

It is, however, appropriate to recollect that at the time of the
Renaissance, before the blossoming in England of this literature for
ladies, Caxton too had enumerated the chief qualities of the women of
his country. They are the same as in Lyly, only, as we shall see, the
honest printer closes his remarks with a slight reservation. In the
preface placed at the beginning of a work translated from the French by
Lord Rivers, he states that in the translation, several passages
reflecting on the female sex were suppressed; that is easily understood;
they would have no application in England; "for I wote wel," says he,
"of w