g of letters, essays, and dialogues,
including _A Cooling Carde for all Fond Lovers_, a treatise on
education, and a refutation of atheism, and so amid the thunders of the
artillery of platitude the first part of _Euphues_ closes.

Professor Raleigh's explanation of this tedious moralizing is that Lyly,
wit and euphuist, possessed the Nonconformist conscience: "Beneath the
courtier's slashed doublet, under his ornate brocade and frills, there
stood the Puritan." This I believe to be a mistaken view of the case. As
we shall later see reason to suppose, Lyly never became, as did his
acquaintance Gosson, a very seriously-minded person. Certainly _Euphues_
does not prove that Puritanism was latent in him. The moral atmosphere
which pervades it was not of Lyly's invention; he inherited it from his
predecessors Guevara and Castiglione, and he employed it because he knew
that it was expected of him. That he moralized not so much from
conviction as from convention (to use a euphuism), is, I think,
sufficiently proved by the fact that in the second part of his novel,
where he is addressing a new public, the pulpit strain is much less
frequent, while in his plays it entirely disappears. The _Anatomy of
Wit_ is essentially the work of an inexperienced writer, feeling his way
towards a public, and without sufficient skill or courage to dispense
with the conventions which he has inherited from previous writers. One
feels, while reading the book, that Lyly was himself conscious that his
hero was an insufferable coxcomb, and that he only created him because
he wished to comply with the public taste. It may be, as M. Jusserand
asserts, that Lyly anticipated Richardson, but, if the light-hearted
Oxford madcap had any qualities in common with the sedate bookseller,
artistic sincerity was not one of them.

What has just been said is not entirely applicable to the treatise on
education which passed under the title of _Euphues and his Ephoebus_.
Although simply an adaptation of the _De Educatione_ of Plutarch, it was
not entirely devoid of originality. Here we find the famous attack upon
Oxford, which was, we fear, prompted by a desire to spite the University
authorities rather than by any earnest feeling of moral condemnation.
But in addition to this there are contributions of Lyly's own invention
to the theory of teaching which are not without merit. He was, as we
have seen, interested in education. It seems even possible that he had
act