m, against which all his sympathies were enlisted, as his
contributions to the _Marprelate_ controversy indicate. I have refrained
from touching upon these _Mar-Martin_ tracts because they possess
neither aesthetic nor dynamical importance, being, as Gabriel
Harvey--always ready with the spiteful epigram--describes them,
"alehouse and tinkerly stuffe, nothing worthy a scholar or a real
gentleman." They are worth mentioning, however, as throwing a light upon
the religious prejudices of our author. He was a courtier and he was a
churchman, and in lending his aid to crush sectarians he thought no more
deeply about the matter than he did in voting as Member of Parliament
against measures which conflicted with his social inclinations. There
was probably not an ounce of the theological spirit in his whole
composition; for his refutation of atheism was a youthful essay in
dialectics, a bone thrown to the traditions of the moral Court
treatise.

If, indeed, he was seriously minded in any respect, it was upon the
subject of Art. Himself a novelist and dramatist, he displayed also a
keen delight in music, and evinced a considerable, if somewhat
superficial, interest in painting. And yet, though he apparently made it
his business to know something of every art, he was no sciolist, and, if
he went far afield, it was only in order to improve himself in his own
particular branch. All the knowledge he acquired in such amateur
appreciation was brought to the service of his literary productions. And
the same may be said of his extensive excursions into the land of books.
No Elizabethan dramatist but Lyly, with the possible exception of
Jonson, could marshal such an array of learning, and few could have
turned even what they had with such skill and effect to their own
purposes. Lyly had made a thorough study of such classics as were
available in his day, and we have seen how he employed them in his novel
and in his plays. But the classics formed only a small section of the
books digested by this omnivorous reader. If he could not read Spanish,
French, or Italian, he devoured and assimilated the numerous
translations from those languages into English, Guevara indeed being his
chief inspiration. Nor did he neglect the literature of his own land.
Few books we may suppose, which had been published in English previous
to 1580, had been unnoticed by him. We have seen what a thorough
acquaintance he possessed of English drama before his day, an