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JOHN LYLY.

[LITTLE is known of Lyly's life. He was born in Kent in 1554, studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, was patronised by Lord Burghley, and wrote plays for the Child players at the Chapel Royal,—the ‘aery of children,' alluded to in Hamlet, 'little eyases, that cry out on the top of the question and are most tyrannically clapped for 't.' He died in 1606. His Euphues was published, first part in 1579, second part in 1580.]

The airy mirthful plays and pretty little songs of the 'witty, comical, facetiously quick and unparalleled John Lyly,' as his publisher described him, are a standing refutation of M. Taine's picture of England in the Elizabethan age as a sort of den of wild beasts. No Frenchman in any age was ever more light and gay than Queen Elizabeth's favourite writer of comedies, and the inventor or perfecter of a fashionable style of sentimental speech among her courtiers.

The epithet 'unparalleled' applied to Lyly was more exact than puffs generally are. Though he is said to have set a fashion of talk among the ladies of the Court and their admirers, he found no imitator in letters; his peculiar style perished from literature with himself. Scott's Sir Percie Shafton is called a Euphuist, and is supposed to be an attempt at historical reproduction, but the caricature has hardly any point of likeness with the supposed original as we see it in the language which Lyly puts into the mouth of Euphues himself. Shafton is much more like Sidney's Rhombus or Shakespeare's Holofernes, a fantastic pedant at whom the real Euphuists would have mocked with as genuine contempt as plain people of the present time. The dainty courtier Boyet, in Love's Labour's Lost, who, according to the sarcastic Biron, 'picks up wit as pigeons pease,' is perhaps the nearest approach to a Euphuist such as was modelled upon Lyly that we have in literature. The essence of Lyly's Euphuism is its avoidance of

cumbrous and clumsy circumlocution; his style is neat, precise, quick, balanced; full of puns and pretty conceits

'Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies,
Playing with words and idle similes,'

as a satirist of the time describes it—but never verbose and heavy as the Euphuists' style is sometimes represented.

Lyly wrote more comedies than any writer that preceded him, but he had no influence that can be traced upon our literature. We seem to find the key to their character in the fact that they were written to be played by children and heard and seen by ladies. Their pretty love-scenes, joyous pranks, and fantastically worded moralisings, were too light and insubstantial as fare for the common stage, and they were superseded as Court entertainments after Elizabeth's death by masques in which ingenious scenic effects were the chief attraction, and plays with an ampler allowance of blood and muscle. Lyly's childlike comedies, with their pigmy fun and pretty sentiment, were brushed aside by plays that appealed more seriously to the senses and the imagination; but it seems almost a pity that the example of his neatness and finish in construction did not take root. Perhaps the daintiness in his manipulation of his materials would have been impossible if the materials had been coarser or more solid.

Only one of Lyly's undoubted comedies, The Woman in the Moon, was written in verse, and the verse differs little from his prose. It shows the same neat, ingenious workmanship. The reader is not conscious of any inward pressure of heightened feeling upon Lyly's verse; he probably chose this instrument in preference to prose because it had become fashionable.

W. MINTO.

SAPPHO'S SONG.

[From Sappho and Phao.]

O cruel Love! on thee I lay

My curse, which shall strike blind the day;
Never may sleep with velvet hand

Charm thine eyes with sacred wand;

Thy jailors still be hopes and fears;

Thy prison-mates groans, sighs, and tears;
Thy play to wear out weary times,
Fantastic passions, vows, and rhymes;
Thy bread be frowns; thy drink be gall;
Such as when you Phao call

The bed thou liest on by despair;

Thy sleep, fond dreams; thy dreams, long care; Hope (like thy fool) at thy bed's head,

Mock thee, till madness strikes thee dead,

As Phao, thou dost me, with thy proud eyes.

In thee poor Sappho lives, in thee she dies.

APELLES' SONG.

[From Alexander and Campaspe.]

Cupid and my Campaspe played
At cards for kisses-Cupid paid.

He stakes his quiver, bows and arrows,
His mother's doves and team of sparrows:
Loses them too; then down he throws

The coral of his lip, the rose

Growing on's cheek (but none knows how);
With these the crystal of his brow,
And then the dimple of his chin—
All these did my Campaspe win.

At last he set her both his eyes.-
She won, and Cupid blind did rise.
O Love, has she done this to thee?
What shall, alas! become of me?

PAN'S SONG.

[From Midas.]

Pan's Syrinx was a girl indeed,
Though now she's turned into a reed.
From that dear reed Pan's pipe doth come,
A pipe that strikes Apollo dumb;
Nor flute, nor lute, nor gittern can
So chant it, as the pipe of Pan.
Cross-gartered swains, and dairy girls,
With faces smug and round as pearls,
When Pan's shrill pipe begins to play,
With dancing wear out night and day;
The bag-pipe drone his hum lays by
When Pan sounds up his minstrelsy.
His minstrelsy! O base! This quill
Which at my mouth with wind I fill
Puts me in mind though her I miss
That still my Syrinx' lips I kiss.

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[GEORGE PEELE was probably born in 1558. He was ‘a most noted poet in the University' of Oxford, and taking up his residence in London became one of the band of University writers for the stage, with whom the 'player' Shakespeare's first efforts as a dramatist brought him into conflict. His first published play was a ‘pastoral,' The Arraignment of Paris, which had been performed before Queen Elizabeth in 1584. It is supposed that he wrote more plays for the public stage than have been preserved. He also composed pageants for the great city festivals, making a precarious living by his wits. Occasional verses of Peele's appear in the poetic collections of the period. He died before 1598.]

Peele was one of the singers before the great Elizabethan sunrise, and his notes contain no anticipatory vibration of the burst of song that was to follow him. His University friends,

even after Marlowe had made his voice heard, spoke of him as the Atlas of poetry, inferior to none, and in some respects superior to all; but this partial verdict can now be recorded only as an example of how contemporary criticism is sometimes mistaken. In reading his plays now one is more astonished that Greene and Nash should have considered him worthy to be named in the same breath with Marlowe, than that the theatrical managers of the time, so much to their indignation, should have rejected his plays in favour of the productions of non-academic workmen. Peele's blank verse, which was so much admired by his academic contemporaries, gives us a fair idea of the environment out of which Marlowe emerged, and increases our admiration of that mighty genius. It deserves the praise of 'smoothness' which it received from Campbell; it is graceful and elegant, but it has neither sinew nor majesty. I have quoted what seems to me to be the most favourable example of his use of this instrument, an address prefixed to one of his plays, The Tale of Troy, published in 1599, two years after the production of Tamburlaine. The

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