on to the
Queen--can only be guessed at. But we can well picture him, following
his magnificently over-dressed patron up the long reception-room, his
heart beating with pleasurable excitement, yet his manners not forgotten
in the hour of his pride, as he nods to an acquaintance and bows with
sly demureness to some Iffida or Camilla. Those were the days of his
success, the happiest period of his life when, as secretary to the Lord
Chamberlain and associate of the highest in the land, he breathed his
native atmosphere, the praises and flattery of a fickle world of
fashion. But, time-server as he was, he was no sycophant. Leaving de
Vere's service after a sharp quarrel, he was not ashamed to take up the
profession of teaching in which he had already had some experience. We
see him next, therefore, a master of St Paul's, engrossed in the not
unpleasant duties of drilling his pupils for the performance of his
plays, accompanying their songs on his instrument, or himself taking his
place on the stage, now as Diogenes in his ubiquitous tub, and now as
the golden-bearded and long-eared Midas. And last of all he appears as
the disappointed, disillusioned man, "infelix academicus ignotus." A
wife and children on his hands, his occupation gone, his hopes of the
Revels Mastership blasted, he becomes desperate, and writes that last
bitter letter to Elizabeth.

[134] From the _Preface_.

The man of fashion out of date, the social success left high and dry by
the unheeding current, he died eventually in poverty, not because he had
wasted his substance, like Greene, in Bohemia, but because, thinking to
take Belgravia by storm, he had forgotten that the foundations of that
city are laid on the bodies of her sons. But leaving

"The thrice three muses mourning for the death
Of Learning late deceased in beggary,"

let us look more closely into the character of this man, whose brilliant
and successful youth was followed by so sad an old age.

In spite of Professor Raleigh and the moralizing of _Euphues_, we may
decide that there was nothing of the Puritan about him. His life at
Oxford, his attachment to the notorious de Vere, the keen pleasure he
took in the things of this world, are, I think, sufficient to prove
this. His general attitude towards life was one of vigorous hedonism,
not of intellectual asceticism. The ethical element of _Euphues_ links
him rather to the already vanishing Humanism than to the rising
Puritanis