few years ago, definitely injurious to a true appreciation of our
author's position, by blocking the path to a recognition of his
importance in other directions. And yet, in spite of all this, it cannot
be said that any adequate examination of the structure of Lyly's style
appeared until Mr Child took the matter in hand in 1894[15]. And Mr
Child has performed his task so scientifically and so exhaustively that
he has killed the topic by making any further treatment of it
superfluous. This being the case, a description of the euphuistic style
need not detain us for long. I shall content myself with the briefest
summary of its characteristics, drawing upon Mr Child for my matter, and
referring those who are desirous of further details to Mr Child's work
itself. We shall then be in a position to proceed to the more
interesting, and as yet unsettled problem, of the origins of euphuism.
The great value of Mr Child's work lies in the fact that he has at once
simplified and amplified the conclusions of previous investigators. Dr
Weymouth[16] was the first to discover that, beneath the "curtizan-like
painted affectation" of euphuism, there lay a definite theory of style
and a consistent method of procedure. Dr Landmann carried the analysis
still further in his now famous paper published in the _New Shakespeare
Society's Transactions_ (1880-82). But these two, and those who have
followed them, have erred, on the one hand in implying that euphuism was
much more complex than it is in reality, and on the other by confining
their attention to single sentences, and so failing to perceive that the
euphuistic method was applicable to the paragraph, as a whole, no less
than to the sentence. And it is upon these two points that Mr Child's
essay is so specially illuminating. We shall obtain a correct notion of
the "essential character" of the "euphuistic rhetoric," he writes, "if
we observe that it employs but one simple principle in practice, and
that it applies this, not only to the ordering of the single sentence,
but in every structural relation[17]": and this simple principle is "the
inducement of artificial emphasis through Antithesis and
Repetition--Antithesis to give pointed expression to the thought,
Repetition to enforce it[18]." When Lyly set out to write his novel, it
seemed that his intention was to produce a most elaborate essay in
antithesis. The book as a whole, "very pleasant for all gentlemen to
read and most necessary t