ies are by no
means uncommon, and often hold their ground for a considerable period.
Beside the vogue of Waller, for example, the duration of Lyly's
reputation was comparatively brief. More than a century after the
publication of his poems, Waller was hailed by the Sidney Lee of the day
in the _Biographia Britannica_ of 1766, as "the most celebrated Lyric
Poet that England ever produced." Whence comes this striking contrast
between past glory and present neglect? How is it that a writer once
known as the greatest master of English prose, and a poet once named the
most conspicuous of English lyrists, are now but names? They have not
faded from memory owing to a mere caprice of fashion. Great artists are
subject to an ebb and flow of popularity, for which as yet no tidal
theory has been offered as an explanation; but like the sea they are
ever permanent. The case of our two writers is different. The wheel of
time will never bring _Euphues_ and _Sacharissa_ "to their own again."
They are as dead as the Jacobite cause. And for that very reason they
are all the more interesting for the literary historian. All writers are
conditioned by their environment, but some concern themselves with the
essentials, others with the accidents, of that internally constant, but
externally unstable, phenomenon, known as humanity. Waller and Lyly were
of the latter class. Like jewels suitable to one costume only, they
remained in favour just as long as the fashion that created them lasted.
Waller was probably inferior to Lyly as an artist, but he happened to
strike a vein which was not exhausted until the end of the 18th century;
while the vogue of _Euphues_, though at first far-reaching, was soon
crossed by new artificialities such as arcadianism. The secret of
Waller's influence was that he stereotyped a new poetic form, a form
which, in its restraint and precision, was exactly suited to the
intellect of the _ancien regime_ with its craving for form and its
contempt for ideas. The mainspring of Lyly's popularity was that he did
in prose what Waller did in poetry.

[13] _A discourse of English Poetrie_, Arber's reprint.

SECTION I. _The Anatomy of Euphuism._

The books which have been written upon the characteristics of Lyly's
prose are numberless, and far outweigh the attention given to his power
as a novelist, to say nothing of his dramas[14]. Indeed the absorption
of the critics in the analysis of euphuism seems to have been, up to a