will bringe me forwarde to my haven."[58] This is a moderate specimen of the ornate and exaggerated language which was following the new acquisitions of learning and intelligence, just as extravagance in dress and food was following the new prosperity and wealth.  Men wished to crowd their learning and cultivation into every thing they said or wrote.  As the language was not yet settled by good prose writers, the more affected a style, the more numerous its similes, and far-fetched its allusions, the more ingenious and admirable it was considered to be.  There resulted a sacrifice of clearness and simplicity to a strained elegance.  Still, in the Euphuistic style, tedious and grotesque as it often is, appear the first serious efforts, among English prose writers, to attain a better mode of expression.  The results which followed the absence of a standard written language at home were strengthened by the general acquaintance with foreign literature.  Italy in the sixteenth century was the leading intellectual nation, and the example of the refined and over-polished manner of writing there prevalent had much to do with the growth in England of a fondness for affected mannerisms and fancied ornaments of language.  The new ideas in regard to poetry and versification which Wyat and Surrey had brought from Italy, were but the beginning of an extensive Italian influence.  It was not without reason that Ascham inveighed against “the enchantments of Circe brought out of Italy to mar men’s manners in England.”  Italian works were translated and circulated in great numbers in England, and among these the most popular were the gay and amorous productions of the story tellers.[59]

Born in Kent in 1554, John Lyly studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and received the degree of Master of Arts.  Not a very diligent scholar, he disliked the “crabbed studies” of logic and philosophy, “his genie being naturally bent to the pleasant paths of poetry,” but he was reputed at the University as afterward at Elizabeth’s court, “a rare poet, witty, comical, and facetious.”  During his life in London he produced a number of plays and poems which have given his name a not inconsiderable place in the list of Elizabethan poets and dramatists.  He is now best known, where known at all, by his prose work “Euphues,” which was so much admired at Elizabeth’s court, that all the ladies knew his phrases by heart, and to “parley Euphuism” was a sign of breeding.  For many years Lyly lingered about the court waiting for a promised position to reward his labors and support his declining years.  But in vain.  “A thousand hopes,” he complained, “but all nothing; a hundred promises, but yet nothing.”  Lyly died in 1606, leaving, as he said, but three legacies; “Patience to my creditors, Melancholie without measure to my friends, and Beggarie without shame to my family.”