In writing English, Ascham was all for plain English. Foreign words Anglicized make such a mixture "as if you put malmsey and sack, red wine and white, ale and beer, all in one pot". Yet he advocates in his "School Master," published after his death, a yet more unhallowed blend, the use of Greek measures in English verse. "Our English tongue in avoiding barbarous _rhyming_ may as well receive right _quantity_ of syllables as either Greek or Latin." (He means "quantity" as opposed to accent, as if one said car_pen_ter.) As an example he quotes Mr. Watson's rendering of the third line of the "Odyssey" into two English hexameters All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses, For that he knew many men's manners and saw many cities. Obviously if we are to say "men's man_ners_," making "man" in "manners" long, we must not make "vellers" in "travellers" short, as Mr. Watson does. We are reduced to Gladly report great praise of Ulysses do the tra_vellers._ This absurd manner of imitating Greek measures in English was upheld, twenty years later, by Gabriel Harvey, who, for a moment, nearly corrupted the practice of Spenser, the most naturally musical of poets. Ascham's own prose style is unaffected, not corrupted by eccentricities, but not harmonious. A new perfection, a false perfection, was to be sought later, through the antitheses, alliterations, and pedantic wit of Lyly's "Euphues!" Lyly's Euphues. The prose of Ascham was clear and was plain, disdaining decoration and far-fetched gorgeous phrases. But for the gorgeous and the exotic, the taste of the Elizabethan Age was pronounced, as we see in the strange over-gaudy costumes of the period, the various ruffs, the jewelled velvets and silks, worn by men and women. A like dressing for thoughts was demanded, and the supply was provided by John Lyly, whose plays are to be mentioned later. Lyly was born a Kentish man (1554?); Magdalen, in Oxford, was his college; his plays, acted by the boys of the Chapel Royal and St. Paul's, are of 1584-1594. But he made his mark earlier, as a prose writer, in his "Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit" (1579), and the sequel, "Euphues and his England" (1580). The style became a fashion, a fashion which affected even those who, like Sidney, were in would-be revolt against it. Lyly, like all writers of the periods just before and after him, was copious in classical allusions. He was not the first to hunt in all directions, especially in fictitious natural history, for similes, and needless decorations; but he hunted further and more assiduously: emphatically his style is that of the unresting Bird of Paradise. Every sentence is a thing bristling with points and antitheses and alliterations. The first part of the book was a kind of novel; two friends, at Naples, woo the same woman, quarrel, write long letters, and the question of education, in the wide sense in which the Renaissance understood education, is always prominent. There is