:

"As amongst all the bonds of benevolence and good will, there is none
more honourable, ancient, or honest than marriage, so in my fancy there
is none that doth more firmly fasten and inseparably unite us together
than the same estate doth, or wherein the fruits of true friendship do
more plenteously appear: in the father is a certain severe love and
careful goodwill towards the child, the child beareth a fearful
affection and awful obedience towards the father: the master hath an
imperious regard of the servant, the servant a servile care of the
master. The friendship amongst men is grounded upon no love and
dissolved upon every light occasion: the goodwill of kinsfolk is
constantly cold, as much of custom as of devotion: but in this stately
estate of matrimony there is nothing fearful, all things are done
faithfully without doubting, truly without doubling, willingly without
constraint, joyfully without complaint: yea there is such a general
consent and mutual agreement between the man and wife, that they both
wish and will covet and crave one thing. And as a scion grafted in a
strange stalk, their natures being united by growth, they become one and
together bear one fruit: so the love of the wife planted in the breast
of her husband, their hearts by continuance of love become one, one
sense and one soul serveth them both. And as the scion severed from the
stock withereth away, if it be not grafted in some other: so a loving
wife separated from the society of her husband withereth away in woe and
leadeth a life no less pleasant than death[60]." Lyly never wrote
anything to equal this. Indeed it is not unworthy of the lips of one of
Shakespeare's heroines.

[59] _Dict. of Nat. Biog._, Pettie.

[60] I have taken the liberty of modernising the spelling.

The euphuism of the foregoing quotation will be readily detected. The
sole difference between the styles of Lyly and Pettie is that, while
Pettie's similes from nature are simple and natural, Lyly, with his
knowledge of Pliny and of the bestiaries, added his fabulous "unnatural
natural history." Pettie's book was popular for the time, three editions
of it being called for in the first year of its publication, but it was
soon to be thrust aside by the fame of the much more pretentious, and,
apart from the style, better constructed _Euphues_ of Lyly. In truth, as
Gabriel Harvey justly but unkindly remarks, "Young Euphues but hatched
the eggs his elder freendes la