to discuss the subject so dangerous to
both, and conversation conditioned by this fact inevitably becomes
subtle, allusive, intense; for it derives its light and shade from the
flicker of that fire which the company finds such a perilous fascination
in playing with. Lyly's work does not exhibit quite such modernity as
this, but we may truthfully say that his _Euphues and his England_ is
the psychological novel in germ.

Its latent possibilities were however not perceived by the writers of
the 16th century. The style which had in part won popularity for it so
speedily was the cause also of its equally speedy decline. Like a fossil
in the stratum of euphuism it was soon covered up by the artificial
layer of arcadianism. The novel of Sidney, though its loose and
meandering style marked a reaction against euphuism, carried on the
Lylian tradition in its appeal to ladies. The _Arcadia_, in no way so
modern as the _Euphues_, lies for that very reason more directly in the
line of development[95]; for, while the former is linked by the
heroical romance of the seventeenth century to the romance of this day,
the latter's influence is not visible until the eighteenth century, if
we except its immediate Elizabethan imitators. And yet, as we remarked
of Lyly's prose, a book which received so many editions cannot have been
entirely without effect upon the minds of its readers and upon the
literature of the age. This influence, however, could have been little
more than suggestive and indirect, and it is quite impossible to
determine its value. Its importance for us lies in the fact that we can
realise how it anticipated the novel of the 18th and 19th centuries. Not
until the days of Richardson is it possible to detect a Lylian flavour
in English fiction; and even here it would be risky to insist too
pointedly on any inference that might be drawn from the coincidence of
an abridged form of _Euphues_ being republished (after almost a
century's oblivion) twenty years before the appearance of _Pamela_. A
direct literary connexion between Lyly and Richardson seems out of the
question: and the utmost we can say with certainty is that the novel of
the latter, in providing moral food for its own generation, relieved the
18th century reader of the necessity of going back to the Elizabethan
writer for the entertainment he desired. As a novelist, therefore, Lyly
was only of secondary dynamical importance, by which I mean that,
although we can re