ions; thinking it sufficient if once in a month we enjoy a
glimpse of thy majesty; and then, to increase our griefs, thou
dost decrease thy gleams; coming out of thy royal robes,
wherewith thou dazzlest our eyes, down into thy swath clouts,
beguiling our eyes; and then----"

In these plays there are excellent phrases and even striking scenes. But
they are not in the true sense dramatic, and are constantly spoilt by
Lyly's strange weakness for conceited style. Everybody speaks in
antitheses, and the intolerable fancy similes, drawn from a kind of
imaginary natural history, are sometimes as prominent as in _Euphues_
itself. Lyly's theatre represents, in short, a mere backwater in the
general stream of dramatic progress, though not a few allusions in other
men's work show us that it attracted no small attention. With Nash alone,
of the University Wits proper, was Lyly connected, and this only
problematically. He was an Oxford man, and most of them were of Cambridge;
he was a courtier; if a badly-paid one, and they all lived by their wits;
and, if we may judge by the very few documents remaining, he was not
inclined to be hail-fellow-well-met with anybody, while they were all born
Bohemians. Yet none of them had a greater influence on Shakespere than
Lyly, though it was anything but a beneficial influence, and for this as
well as for the originality of his production he deserves notice, even had
the intrinsic merit of his work been less than it is. But, in fact, it is
very great, being almost a typical production of talent helped by
knowledge, but not mastered by positive genius, or directed in its way by
the precedent work of others.

In the work of the University Wits proper--Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Lodge,
Nash, and Kyd, the last of whom, it must again be said, is not certainly
known to have belonged to either university, though the probabilities are
all in favour of that hypothesis--a very different kind of work is found.
It is always faulty, as a whole, for even _Dr. Faustus_ and _Edward II._,
despite their magnificent poetry and the vast capabilities of their form,
could only be called good plays or good compositions as any kind of whole
by a critic who had entirely lost the sense of proportion. But in the whole
group, and especially in the dramatic work of Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and
Kyd (for that of Lodge and Nash is small in amount and comparatively
unimportant in manner), the presence, the throe