of a voyage to the Indies without stumbling on a preliminary reference to the opinions of Aristotle and Plato.  Lastly, Euphues is characterised by an extraordinary wealth of allusion to natural history, mostly of a fabulous kind.  “I have read that the bull being tied to the fig tree loseth his tail; that the whole herd of deer stand at gaze if they smell a sweet apple; that the dolphin after the sound of music is brought to the shore,” and so on.  His book is full of these things, and the style weakens and loses its force because of them.

Of course there is much more in his book than this outward decoration.  He wrote with the avowed purpose of instructing courtiers and gentlemen how to live. Euphues is full of grave reflections and weighty morals, and is indeed a collection of essays on education, on friendship, on religion and philosophy, and on the favourite occupation and curriculum of Elizabethan youth—­foreign travel.  The fashions and customs of his countrymen which he condemns in the course of his teaching are the same as those inveighed against by Stubbs and other contemporaries.  He disliked manners and fashions copied from Italy; particularly he disliked the extravagant fashions of women.  One woman only escapes his censure, and she, of course, is the Queen, whom Euphues and his companion in the book come to England to see.  In the main the teaching of Euphues inculcates a humane and liberal, if not very profound creed, and the book shares with The Fairy Queen the honour of the earlier Puritanism—­the Puritanism that besides the New Testament had the Republic.

But Euphues, though he was in his time the popular idol, was not long in finding a successful rival.  Seven years before his death Sir Philip Sidney, in a period of retirement from the Court wrote “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”; it was published ten years after it had been composed.  The Arcadia is the first English example of the prose pastoral romance, as the Shepherd’s Calendar is of our pastoral verse.  Imitative essays in its style kept appearing for two hundred years after it, till Wordsworth and other poets who knew the country drove its unrealities out of literature.  The aim of it and of the school to which it belonged abroad was to find a setting for a story which should leave the author perfectly free to plant in it any improbability he liked, and to do what he liked with the relations of his characters.  In the shade of beech trees, the coils of elaborated and intricate love-making wind and unravel themselves through an endless afternoon.  In that art nothing is too far-fetched, nothing too sentimental, no sorrow too unreal.  The pastoral romance was used, too, to cover other things besides a sentimental and decorative treatment of love.  Authors wrapped up as shepherds their political friends and enemies, and the pastoral eclogues in verse which Spenser and others composed are full of personal and political allusion.