herself)--Ay but indeed I cannot love at all."

This parody, apart from any interest it possesses for the student of
Lyly, is an excellent illustration of the ways of Elizabethan
playwrights, and of the thorough knowledge of previous plays they
assumed their audience to have possessed. There are several other
examples of Kyd's acquaintance with the _Euphues_ in the _Spanish
Tragedy_[64], in the other dramas[65], and in his prose works[66], which
it is not necessary to quote. But there is one more passage, again from
his most famous play, which is so full of interest that it cannot be
passed over in silence. It is a counsel of hope to the despairing lover,
and assumes this inspiring form:

"My Lord, though Belimperia seem thus coy
Let reason hold you in your wonted joy;
In time the savage Bull sustains the yoke,
In time all Haggard Hawkes will stoop to lure,
In time small wedges cleave the hardest Oake,
In time the flint is pearst with softest shower,
And she in time will fall from her disdain,
And rue the sufferance of your deadly paine[67]."

[64] _Sp. Trag._, Act IV. 190 (cp. _Euphues_, p. 146).

[65] _Soliman and Perseda_, Act III. 130 (cp. _Euphues_, p. 100), and
Act II. 199.

[66] _Kyd's Works_ (Boas), p. 288, and ch. IX.

[67] _Sp. Trag._, Act II. 1-8.

Now these lines are practically a transcript of the opening words of the
47th sonnet in Watson's _Hekatompathia_ published in 1582. Remembering
Lyly's penetrating observation that "the soft droppes of rain pearce the
hard marble, many strokes overthrow the tallest oake[68]," and bearing
in mind that the high priest of euphuism himself contributed a
commendatory epistle to the _Hekatompathia_, we should expect that these
Bulls and Hawkes and Oakes were choice flowers of speech, culled from
that botanico-zoological "garden of prose"--the _Euphues_. But as a
matter of fact Watson himself informs us in a note that his sonnet is an
imitation of the Italian Serafino, from whom he also borrows other
sonnet-conceits in the same volume, some of which are full of similar
references to the properties of animals and plants. The conclusion is
forced upon us therefore that Watson and Lyly went to the same source,
or, if a knowledge of Italian cannot be granted to our author, that he
borrowed from Watson. At any rate Watson cannot be placed amongst the
imitators of _Euphues_. Like Pettie and Gosson he must share with Lyly