This fashion of dress lent wide scope to bad taste, and such books as Dekker's delightful _Guls Hornbook_ show how hard gulls tried to be gallants and how ridiculously they often failed. And it gave the genuine courtier full scope for magnificence. Ralegh could wear white satin and pearls. Not only in dress was the courtier distinct, but also in language. Fashions in speech were constantly in vogue. None was more pronounced than the fashion set by John Lyly, who wrote elegant court plays and the novel _Euphues_. Of Euphues with his instructive letters and sound moral tone Sir Charles Grandison is the direct descendant: Richardson owed as much to Lyly, as Defoe to Thomas Nash or Fielding to Defoe. But that is a literary by-path which leads to the history of fiction. His immediate influence was on the speech of the courtiers and the language of the Court. "That beautie in Court which could not parley Euphuisme was as shee which now there speaks not French." John Lyly came to Court about 1577 and was helped by Lord Burghley; perhaps the rage of affectation which he started, gave the stern Lord Treasurer a distaste for poets and was one of the reasons which made him disinclined to favour Spenser afterwards. Probably Lyly seemed innocuous enough at first, with his modest desire to lie shut in a lady's casket rather than open in a scholar's library. No one could have foreseen the frenzied fashion which he inaugurated and which with its stilted periphrases must have been sorely irritating to the great matter-of-fact man of business. No wonder he looked askance at poets. Euphuism, as the jargon is called, has been described many times; it was the first effort in English towards ornament in speech. In itself it was wholly good; in its excess it was wholly bad. As a fashion of speech it must have been not a little wearisome. And indeed that proved to be the case; for its place was taken about as soon as dull people were beginning to obtain the knack of it by another fashion, no less elaborate, but of a different manner of elaborateness taken from Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_. Here a jingle on one word was the effect to be obtained, as for example, "Each senselesse thing had sense of pity; only they that had sense were senselesse." This fashion set by a writer upon the speech of the fashionable finds a modern counterpart in the influence of Oscar Wilde, with this difference that his pointed epigram becomes feeble nonsense and his genius for using the right word degenerates into amiable talk about passionate neckties and purple sin; whereas with Lyly's and Sidney's manner no imitation could be feebler or more exaggerated than the original often is--not always. Lyly has real wit and fancy, especially in his charming court plays, as when he writes, "They give us pap with a spoon before we can speak, and when we speake for that we love, pap with a hatchet"; there he is inimitable.