wisdom, his gracefulness and also his
bad style, Lyly could not fail to please. His public was ready when he
began writing, a public with many frivolous tastes and many serious
instincts. The lightness of tone and of behaviour which struck a
foreigner coming for the first time to the English court or a
professional censor who by trade is meant to see nothing else, was
misleading as showing only the surface of the sort of mankind that was
flourishing there at that time. This lightness of tone, however, did
exist nevertheless, and those who assumed it were not slow to embellish
their speeches with flowers from Lyly's paper garden. The austere French
Huguenot, Hubert Languet, the friend and adviser of Sir Philip Sidney,
who visited England in the very year "Euphues" was published, was very
much astonished to see how English courtiers behaved themselves;
accustomed as he was to the grave talk he enjoyed with his young friend,
he had imagined, it seems, that no other was relished by him or by
anybody in Queen Elizabeth's palaces. When he left the country he wrote
to Sidney his opinion of the manners he had observed. It is simply a
confirmation of what Ascham had stated sometime before, when he wrote of
his travelled compatriots: neither of them did justice to the more
serious qualities hidden under all this courtly trifling: "It was a
delight to me last winter," says Languet, "to see you high in favour and
enjoying the esteem of all your countrymen; but to speak plainly, the
habits of your court seemed to me somewhat less manly than I could have
wished, and most of your noblemen appeared to me to seek for a
reputation more by a kind of affected courtesy than by those virtues
which are wholesome to the State, and which are most becoming to
generous spirits and to men of high birth. I was sorry therefore, and so
were other friends of yours, to see you wasting the flower of your life
on such things, and I feared lest that noble nature of yours should be
brought to take pleasure in pursuits which only enervate the mind."[94]

Lyly's book proved well suited to this public; it went through numerous
editions; it was printed five times during the first six years of its
publication, and new editions were issued from time to time till 1636.
It gave birth, as we shall see, to many imitations; the name of Euphues
on the title-page of a novel was for years considered a safe conduct to
the public, if not to posterity; books purporting to