. Yet it did much to form the
hitherto loose structure of English prose, by lending it point and
polish. His carefully balanced periods were valuable lessons in
rhetoric, and his book became a manual of polite conversation and
introduced that fashion of witty repartee, which is evident enough in
Shakspere's comic dialogue. In 1580 appeared the second part, _Euphues
and his England,_ and six editions of the whole work were printed before
1598. Lyly had many imitators. In Stephen Gosson's _School of Abuse_, a
tract directed against the stage and published about four months later
than the first part of _Euphues_, the language is directly Euphuistic.
The dramatist, Robert Greene, published, in 1587, his _Menaphon;
Camilla's Alarum to Slumbering Euphues_, and his _Euphues's Censure to
Philautus_. His brother dramatist, Thomas Lodge, published, in 1590,
_Rosalynde: Euphues's Golden Legacy_, from which Shakspere took the plot
of _As You Like It_. Shakspere and Ben Jonson both quote from _Euphues_
in their plays, and Shakspere was really writing Euphuism when he wrote
such a sentence as "'Tis true, 'tis pity; pity 'tis 'tis true."

[Illustration: Chaucer, Spenser, Bacon, Milton.]

That knightly gentleman, Philip Sidney, was a true type of the lofty
aspiration and manifold activity of Elizabethan England. He was scholar,
poet, courtier, diplomatist, soldier, all in one. Educated at Oxford and
then introduced at court by his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, he had
been sent to France when a lad of eighteen, with the embassy which went
to treat of the queen's proposed marriage to the Duke of Alencon, and
was in Paris at the time of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, in 1572.
Afterward he had traveled through Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands,
had gone as embassador to the emperor's court, and every-where won
golden opinions. In 1580, while visiting his sister Mary, Countess of
Pembroke, at Wilton, he wrote, for her pleasure, the _Countess of
Pembroke's Arcadia_, which remained in manuscript till 1590. This was a
pastoral romance, after the manner of the Italian _Arcadia_ of
Sanazzaro, and the _Diana Enamorada_ of Montemayor, a Portuguese author.
It was in prose, but intermixed with songs and sonnets, and Sidney
finished only two books and a portion of the third. It describes the
adventures of two cousins, Musidorus and Pyrocles, who were wrecked on
the coast of Sparta. The plot is very involved and is full of the stock
episodes of r