were left out, though some livelier presentation of his character (which Lyly himself was obviously too much personally interested to make at all clear) would improve the whole immensely.  But it was still too early:  the thing was not yet to be done.  Only, I do not know any book in which the possibilities, and even the outlines, of this thing were indicated and vaguely sketched earlier in any European language, unless it be the Lucretia and Euryalus of AEneas Silvius, which is much more confined in its scope.

The fact is that the very confusedness, the many undeveloped sides, of Euphues, make it much more of an ancestor of the modern novel than if it were more of a piece.  The quicquid agunt homines is as much the province of the novel as of the satire; and there is more than something of this as it affected Elizabethan times in Euphues.  Men’s interest in morals, politics, and education; their development of the modern idea of society; their taste for letters; their conceits and fancies—­all these appear in it.

The Arcadia stands in a different compartment. Euphues is very much sui generis:  failure as it may be from some points of view, it deserves the highest respect for this, and like most other things sui generis it was destined to propagate the genus, if only after many days.  The Arcadia was in intention certainly, and to great extent in actual fact, merely a carrying out of the attempt, common all over Europe (as a result of the critical searchings of heart of the Italians), to practise a new kind—­the Heroic Romance of the sub-variety called pastoral.  The “heroic” idea generally was (as ought to be, but perhaps is not, well known) to blend, after a fashion, classical and romantic characteristics—­to substitute something like the classic unity of fable or plot for the mere “meandering” of romantic story, and to pay at least as much attention to character as the classics had paid, instead of neglecting it altogether, as had recently though not always been the case in Romance.  But the scheme retained on the other hand the variety of incident and appeal of this latter:  and especially assigned to Love the high place which Romance had given it.  As for the Pastoral—­that is almost a story to itself, and a story which has been only once (by Mr. W.W.  Greg) satisfactorily, and then not quite completely, told.  It is enough to say here, and as affecting our own subject, that it supplied a new opportunity of gratifying the passion of the Renaissance for imitating antiquity, at the same time permitting to no small extent the introduction of things that were really romantic, and above all providing a convention.  The Heroic romance generally and the Pastoral in particular went directly back to the Greek romances of Heliodorus and Longus:  but they admitted many new and foreign elements.