As we open our budget to-day, we are still under kingship of the great Queen Bess, in whose presence we saw the portentous Lord Burleigh, whose nod has passed into history; we saw, too, in our swift way, the wise, the judicious, the simple-minded, the mismarried Richard Hooker. We called Spenser before us, and had a taste of those ever-sweet poems of his--ever sweet, though ever so long. Then his friend Philip Sidney flashed across our view, the over-fine gentleman, yet full of nobility and courage, who wrote a long book, _Arcadia_, so bright with yellow splendor as to tire one; and still so full of high thinking as to warrant his fame and to lend a halo to his brave and tragic death. You may remember, too, that I made short mention of a certain John Lyly, who was about the same age with Spenser, and who, with his pretty euphuisms came to cut a larger figure in the days of Elizabeth than many stronger men did. _John Lyly._ I recur to him now and tell you more of him, because he did in his time set a sort of fashion in letters. He was an Oxford man,[95] born down in Kent, and at twenty-five, or thereabout, made his fame by a book, which grew out of suggestions (not only of name but largely of intent and purpose) in the _Schoolmaster_ of Roger Ascham; and thus it happens over and over in the fields of literature, that a plodding man will drop from his store a nugget, over which some fellow of lively parts will stumble into renown. The book I refer to was called _Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit_, which came into such extraordinary favor that he wrote shortly after another, called _Euphues and his England_. And the fashion that he set, was a fashion of affectations--of prettinesses of speech--of piling words on words, daintier and daintier--antithesis upon antithesis, with flavors of wide reading thrown in, and spangled with classic terms and far-fetched similes--so that ladies ambitious of literary fame larded their talk with these fine euphuisms of Mr. Lyly. Something of a coxcomb I think we must reckon him; we might almost say an Oscar Wilde of letters--posing as finely and as capable of drawing female shoals in his wake. His strain for verbal felicities, always noticeable, comparing with good, simple, downright English, as a dancing-master’s mincing step, compares with the assured, steady tread of a go-ahead pedestrian, who thinks nothing of attitudes. Scott, you will remember, sought to caricature the Euphuist, in a somewhat exaggerated way, in Sir Piercie Shafton, who figures in his story of the _Monastery_; he himself, however, in the later annotations of his novel, confesses his failure, and admitted the justice of the criticism which declared Sir Piercie a bore. Shakespeare, also, at a time not far removed from Lyly’s conquest, perhaps intended a slap at the euphuistic craze,[96] in the pedant Schoolmaster’s talk of “Love’s Labor’s Lost.”