[81] Raleigh, p. 47.

Moreover, in aiming at elegance and precision, Lyly attained a lucidity
almost unequalled among his contemporaries. His attention to form saved
him from the besetting sin of Elizabethan prose,--incoherence by reason
of an overwhelming display of ornament. His very illustrations were
subject to the restraint which his style demanded, being sown, to use
his own metaphor, "here and there lyke Strawberries, not in heapes, lyke
Hoppes[82]." Arcadianism came as a reaction against euphuism, attempting
to replace its artificiality by simplicity. But how infinitely more
preferable is the novel of Lyly, with its artificial precision and
lucidity, to the conscious artlessness of Sidney's _Arcadia_, with its
interminable sentences and confused syntax. As a modern euphuist has
taught us, of all poses the natural pose is the most irritating. In
accordance with his desire for precision, Lyly made frequent use of the
short sentence. In this we have another indication of his modernity:
for the short sentence, which is so characteristic of English prose
style to-day, occurs more often in his work than in the writings of any
of his predecessors. And, in reference to the same question of lucidity,
we may notice that he was the first writer who gave special attention to
the separation of his prose into paragraphs,--a matter apparently
trivial, but really of no small importance. Finally, it is a remarkable
fact that the number of words to be found in _Euphues_ which have since
become obsolete is a very small one--"at most but a small fraction of
one per cent.[83]" And this is in itself sufficient to indicate the
influence which Lyly's novel has exerted upon English prose. As he reads
it, no one can avoid being struck by the modernity of its language, an
impression not to be obtained from a perusal of the plays. The
explanation is simple enough. The plays were not read or absorbed by
their author's contemporaries and successors; _Euphues_ was. In the
domain of style, _Euphues_ was dynamical; the plays were not.

[82] _Euphues_, p. 220.

[83] Child, p. 41.

But the true value of Lyly's prose lies not so much in what it achieved
as in what it attempted; for the qualities, which euphuism, by its
insistence upon design and elegance, really aimed at, were strength,
brilliancy, and refinement. For the first time in the history of our
literature, men are found to write prose with the purpose of fascinating
and entici