The pamphlet stories (which are themselves often play-connected, as in the case of Lodge’s Rosalynde and Greene’s Pandosto) do not require much notice, with one exception—­Nash’s Jack Wilton or the Unfortunate Traveller, to which some have assigned a position equal, or perhaps superior in our particular subject, to that of the Arcadia or that of Euphues.  This seems to the present writer a mistake:  but as to appear important is (in a not wholly unreal sense) to be so, the piece shall be separately considered.  The rest are mostly marred by a superabundance of rather rudimentary art, and a very poor allowance of matter.  There is hardly any character, and except in a few pieces, such as Lodge’s Margarite of America, there is little attempt to utilise new scenes and conditions.  But the whole class has special interest for us in one peculiarity which makes it perhaps unreadable to any but students, and that is its saturation with the Elizabethan conceit and word-play which is sometimes called Euphuism.  Nor is this wonderful, considering that more than one of these “pamphlets” is directly connected with the matter and the personages of Euphues itself.  To this famous book, therefore, we had better turn.

Some people, it is believed, have denied that Euphues is a novel at all; and some of these some have been almost indignant at its being called one.  It is certainly, with Rasselas, the most remarkable example, in English, of a novel which is to a great extent deprived of the agremens to which we have for some two centuries been accustomed in the kind, and, to a still greater, loaded with others which do not appeal to us.  To put aside altogether its extraordinary and in a way epoch-making style, which gives it its main actual place in the history of English literature, it is further loaded with didactic digressions which, though certain later novelists have been somewhat peccant in the kind, have never been quite equalled—­no, not in Rasselas itself or the Fool of Quality.  But if anybody, who has the necessary knowledge to understand, and therefore the necessary patience to tolerate, these knotty knarry envelopes, insertions, and excrescences, will for the moment pay no attention to them, but merely strip them off, he will find the carcass of a very tolerable novel left behind.  The first plot of Philautus—­Euphues—­Lucilla, and the successive jilting of the two friends for each other and for Curio, is no mean novel-substance.  Not Balzac himself, certainly no one of his successors, need disdain it:  and more than one of them has taken up something like it.  The journey from Naples to London, and the episode of Fidus and Iffida, could have been worked up, in the good old three-volume days, to a most effective second volume.  And the picture of the court, with the further loves of Philautus, Camilla, and the “violet” Frances, would supply a third of themselves even if Euphues