plain or
busy and intricate or otherwise affected after the rate."[15]

[14] The final _s_ of such names often at the time appears unaltered.

[15] _i.e._ "in proportion."

Contemporary with these, however, there was growing up a quite different
school of English prose which showed itself on one side in the _estilo
culto_ of Lyly and the university wits of his time; on the other, in the
extremely vernacular and sometimes extremely vulgar manner of the
pamphleteers, who were very often the same persons. Lyly himself exhibits
both styles in _Euphues_; and if _Pap with a Hatchet_ and _An Almond for a
Parrot_ are rightly attributed to him, still more in these. So also does
Gabriel Harvey, Spenser's friend, a curious coxcomb who endeavoured to
dissuade Spenser from continuing _The Faerie Queene_, devoted much time
himself and strove to devote other people to the thankless task of
composing English hexameters and trimeters, engaged (very much to his
discomfiture) in a furious pamphlet war with Thomas Nash, and altogether
presents one of the most characteristic though least favourable specimens
of the Elizabethan man of letters. We may speak of him further when we come
to the pamphleteers generally.

John Lyly is a person of much more consequence in English literature than
the conceited and pragmatical pedant who wrote _Pierce's Supererogation_.
He is familiar, almost literally to every schoolboy, as the author of the
charming piece, "Cupid with my Campaspe Played," and his dramatic work will
come in for notice in a future chapter; but he is chiefly thought of by
posterity, whether favourably or the reverse, as the author of _Euphues_.
Exceedingly little is known about his life, and it is necessary to say that
the usually accepted dates of his death, his children's birth, and so
forth, depend wholly on the identification of a John Lilly, who is the
subject of such entries in the registers of a London church, with the
euphuist and dramatist--an identification which requires confirmation. A
still more wanton attempt to supplement ignorance with knowledge has been
made in the further identification with Lyly of a certain "witty and bold
atheist," who annoyed Bishop Hall in his first cure at Hawstead, in
Suffolk, and who is called "Mr. Lilly." All supposed facts about him (or
some other John Lyly), his membership of Parliament and so forth, have been
diligently set forth by Mr. Bond in his Oxford edition of the _Works_, wi