It is to the drama that we must look for the most complete literary expression of the social condition of the period.  The student of history must regret, indeed, that the realistic novel, with its study of human thoughts and motives, with its illustration of manners and customs, so valuable in a reconstruction of the past, should have been delayed till the end of the seventeenth century.  But though there be regret, there cannot be surprise.  The reigns of Elizabeth and the Stuarts cover the period of court life; when men lived in public, and sought their intellectual entertainment in crowds at a theatre, as now, in a time of citizen-life, they seek it in private, by the study-lamp.[57] In a dramatic age the creations of the imagination will be placed behind the footlights, and in a period of quiet and reflection they will be placed between the covers of a book.  In the age of Elizabeth the writers of fiction neither studied the characters and manners of the men about them, nor aimed at any reflection of actual life.  But their tales and romances were the natural fruit of their intellectual condition, and form an interesting if not a valuable portion of English fiction.  In them are reflected the happiness, the poetry, the love of novelty, and the ideality of the time.  The stirring incidents of chivalric romance were no longer in vogue, and the subject became an idealized love.  But the most striking feature of Elizabethan fiction is the great importance attached to style.  The writer cared more to excite admiration by the turn of his phrases and the ornaments of his language, than to interest his reader by plot or incident.

In 1579 John Lyly published his curious romance, “Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit,” a work which attained a great popularity, and made the word Euphuism an abstract term in the language to express the ornate and antithetical style of which this book is the most marked example.  In Lyly’s own day it was said by Edward Blount that the nation was “in his debt for a new English which hee taught them.”  Since then, the verdict of posterity has been that Lyly corrupted the public taste, and introduced an affected and overloaded manner of writing which had a mischievous influence upon literature.  A careful examination of Lyly’s work, and of the condition of the English language in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, will not sustain either of these views.  The Euphuistic style was not of Lyly’s invention.  He acquired it from the men about him, and merely gave it, through his writings, a distinct character and individuality.  In a letter of Elizabeth to her brother Edward vi, long-before “Euphues” was written, occurs the following passage:  “Like as a shipman in stormy wether plukes down the sails tarrying for bettar winde, so did I, most noble kinge, in my unfortunate chanche a Thursday pluk downe the hie sailes of my joy and comforte, and do trust one day that as troublesome waves have repulsed me backwarde, so a gentil winde