facts of animal and vegetable life to point a moral or to
help out a sermon. The arguments he used appear to us puerile in their
old-world dress, and yet similar ones are to be heard to-day in every
pulpit where a smattering of science is used to eke out a poverty of
theology. And, to be fair, such reasoning is not confined to pulpits.
Even so eminent a writer as Mr Edward Carpenter has been known to
moralize on the habits of the wild mustard, irresistibly reminding us of
the "Camomill which the more it is trodden and pressed down the more it
speedeth[25]." Moreover the _soi-disant_ founder of the inductive
method, the great Bacon himself, is, as Liebig[26] shows in his amusing
and interesting study of the renowned "scientist's" scientific methods,
tarred with the same mediaeval brush, and should be ranked with Lyly and
the other Elizabethan "scholastics" rather than with men like Harvey and
Newton.

[25] _Euphues_, p. 46.

[26] _Lord Bacon et les sciences d'observation en moyen age_, par
Liebig, traduit par de Tchihatchef.

Lyly's natural history was at any rate the result of learning; many of
his "facts" were drawn from Pliny, while others were to be found in the
plentiful crop of mediaeval bestiaries, which, as Professor Raleigh
remarks, "preceded the biological hand-books." Perhaps also we must
again allow something for Lyly's invention; for lists of authorities,
and footnotes indicative of sources, were not demanded of the scientist
of those days, and one can thoroughly sympathise with an author who
found an added zest in inventing the facts upon which his theories
rested. Have not ethical philosophers of all ages been guilty of it?
Certainly Gabriel Harvey seems to be hinting at Lyly when he slyly
remarks: "I could name a party, that in comparison of his own
inventions, termed Pliny a barren wombe[27]."

[27] Bond, I. p. 131 note.

The affectations we have just enumerated are much less conspicuous in
the second part of _Euphues_ than in the first, and, though they find a
place in his earlier plays, Lyly gradually frees himself from their
influence, owing perhaps to the decline of the euphuistic fashion, but
more probably to the growth of his dramatic instinct, which saw that
such forms were a drag upon the action of a play. And yet at times Lyly
could use his clumsy weapon with great precision and effect. How
admirably, for example, does he express in his antithetical fashion the
essence of coquetry.