etry; and this alone should give it a claim upon students
of English literature.

[77] Earle, p. 436.

The first point we must notice, therefore, about English euphuism is
that it represents a tendency to confine literature within the limits of
the Court--in accordance, one might almost say, with the general
centralization of politics and religion under the Tudors--and that, as a
necessary result of this, conscious prose style appears for the first
time in our language. I say English euphuism, because that is our chief
concern, and because though euphuism on the Continent was, as we have
seen, the expression in literature of the new ideal of the courtier, yet
it was by no means so great an innovation as it was in England, inasmuch
as the Romance literatures had always represented the aristocracy. The
form which this style assumed was dependent upon the circumstances which
gave it birth, and upon the general conditions of the age. Owing to the
former it became erudite, polished, precise, meet indeed for the
"parleyings" of courtiers and maids-in-waiting; but it was to the latter
that it owed its essentials. Hitherto we have contented ourselves with
indicating the rhetorical aspect of euphuism. We have seen that the
Latin orators and the writers of our English homilies exercised a
considerable influence over the new stylists. It was natural that
rhetoricians should attract those who were desirous of writing
ornamental and artistic prose, and one feels inclined to believe that it
was not entirely for spiritual reasons that Lyly frequently attended Dr
Andrews' sermons[78]. But the euphuistic manner has a wider significance
than this, for it marks the transition from poetry to prose.

[78] Bond, I. p. 60.

"The age of Elizabeth is pre-eminently an age of poetry, of which prose
may be regarded as merely the overflow[79]." It was at once the end of
the mediaeval, and the beginning of the modern, world, and consequently,
it displays the qualities of both. But the future lay with the small men
rather than with the great. Shakespeare and Milton were no innovators.
With their names the epoch of primitive literature, which finds
expression in the drama and the epic, ends, while it reaches its highest
flights. The dawn of the modern epoch, the age of prose and of the
novel, is, on the other hand, connected with the names of Lyly, Sidney,
and Nash. Thus, as in the 18th century poetry was subservient, and so
became assimilated