and Walter Scott has made them familiar to modern readers in his novel of Kenilworth.  Sidney was present on this occasion, and, perhaps, Shakspere, then a boy of eleven, and living at Stratford, not far off, may have been taken to see the spectacle; may have seen Neptune riding on the back of a huge dolphin in the castle lake, speaking the copy of verses in which he offered his trident to the empress of the sea; and may have

       heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back
  Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
  That the rude sea grew civil at her song.

But in considering the literature of Elizabeth’s reign it will be convenient to speak first of the prose.  While following up Spenser’s career to its close (1599) we have, for the sake of unity of treatment, anticipated somewhat the literary history of the twenty years preceding.  In 1579 appeared a book which had a remarkable influence on English prose.  This was John Lyly’s Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit.  It was in form a romance, the history of a young Athenian who went to Naples to see the world and get an education; but it is in substance nothing but a series of dialogues on love, friendship, religion, etc., written in language which, from the title of the book, has received the name of Euphuism.  This new English became very fashionable among the ladies, and “that beauty in court which could not parley Euphuism,” says a writer of 1632, “was as little regarded as she which now there speaks not French.”

Walter Scott introduced a Euphuist into his novel the Monastery, but the peculiar jargon which Sir Piercie Shaft on is made to talk is not at all like the real Euphuism.  That consisted of antithesis, alliteration, and the profuse illustration of every thought by metaphors borrowed from a kind of fabulous natural history.  “Descend into thine own conscience and consider with thyself the great difference between staring and stark-blind, wit and wisdom, love and lust; be merry, but with modesty; be sober, but not too sullen; be valiant, but not too venturous.”  “I see now that, as the fish Scolopidus in the flood Araxes at the waxing of the moon is as white as the driven snow, and at the waning as black as the burnt coal; so Euphues, which at the first increasing of our familiarity was very zealous, is now at the last cast become most faithless.”  Besides the fish Scolopidus, the favorite animals of Lyly’s menagerie are such as the chameleon, “which though he have most guts draweth least breath;” the bird Piralis, “which sitting upon white cloth is white, upon green, green;” and the serpent Porphirius, “which, though he be full of poison, yet having no teeth, hurteth none but himself.”