Yet there was a certain good in this massing of epithets, and in this tesselated cumulation of nice bits of language, from which the more wary and skilful of writers could choose--as from a great vocabulary--what words were cleanest and clearest. Nor do I wish to give the impression that there were no evidences of thoughtfulness or of good purpose, under Lyly’s tintinnabulation of words. Hazlitt thought excellently well of him; and Charles Kingsley, in these later times, has pronounced extravagant eulogy of him. Indeed he had high moral likings, though his inspirations are many of them from Plato or Boëthius; it is questionable also if he did not pilfer from Plutarch; certainly he sugar-coats with his language a great many heathen pills. In observation he is very acute. That _Euphues_ who gives name to his book, is an Athenian youth of rare parts--“well-constituted” as the Greek implies--who has lived long in Italy, and who talks in this strain of the ladies he saw on a visit to England:-- “The English Damoiselles have their bookes tied to their girdles--not feathers--who are as cunning in the Scriptures as you are in Ariosto or Petrark. It is the most gorgeous court [of England] that ever I have seene or heard of; but yet do they not use their apparel so nicely as you in Italy, who thinke scorne to kneele at service, for fear of wrinckles in your silk, who dare not lift up your head to heaven, for fear of rumpling the ruffs in your neck; yet your handes, I confess, are holden up, rather I thinke, to show your ringes, than to manifest your righteousness.” Elizabeth would have very probably relished this sort of talk, and have commended the writer in person; nor can there be any doubt that, in such event, Lyly would have mumbled his thanks in kissing the royal hands: there are complaining letters of his on the score of insufficient court patronage, which are not high-toned, and which make us a little doubtful of a goodly manhood in him. Certainly his deservings were great, by reason of the plays which he wrote for her Majesty’s Company of Child-players, and which were acted at the Chapel Royal and in the palaces. In some of these there are turns of expression and of dramatic incident which Shakespeare did not hesitate to convert to his larger purposes; indeed there is, up and down in them, abundance of dainty word-craft--of ingenuity--of more than Elizabethan delicacy too, and from time to time, some sweet little lyrical outburst that holds place still in the anthologies. One of these, with which I daresay you may be over-familiar, is worth quoting again. It is called Apelles’ Song, and it is from the play of “Alexander and Campaspe:”