Allowing for all its author's "picking and stealing," _The Anatomy of Wit_ was in the highest sense an original book; for, though it is the old moral treatise, its form is new, and it is enlivened by a thin thread of narrative. The hero Euphues is a young man lately come from Athens, which is unmistakeably Oxford, to Naples, which is just as unmistakeably London. Here he soon becomes the centre of a convivial circle, where he is wise enough to distinguish between friend and parasite, to discern the difference between the "faith of Laelius and the flattery of Aristippus." The story thus opens bravely, but the words of the title-page, "most necessary to remember," are ever present in the author's mind, and before we have reached the fourth page the sermon is upon us. For "conscience" attired as an old man, Eubulus, now enters the stage of this Court _morality_ and proceeds to deliver a long harangue upon the folly of youth, concluding with much excellent though obvious counsel. We should be in sympathy with the rude answer of Euphues, were it but curt at the same time, but, alas, it covers six pages. Having thus imprudently crushed the "wisdom of eld" by the weight of his utterance, our hero shows his natural preference for the companionship and counsel of youth, by forming an ardent friendship with Philautus, of so close a nature, that "they used not only one boorde but one bed, one booke (if so be that they thought it not one too many)." This alliance, however, is not concluded until Euphues has given us his own views, together with those of half antiquity, upon the subject of friendship, or before he has formally professed his affection in a pompous address, beginning "Gentleman and friend," and has been as formally accepted. By Philautus he is introduced to Lucilla, the chief female character of the book, a lady, if we are to believe the description of her "Lilly cheeks dyed with a Vermilion red," of startling if somewhat factitious beauty. To say that the plot now thickens would be to use too coarse a word; it becomes slightly tinged with incident, inasmuch as Euphues falls in love with Lucilla, the destined bride of Philautus. She reciprocates his passion, and the double fickleness of mistress and friend forms an excellent opportunity, which Lyly does not fail to seize, for infinite moralizings in euphuistic strains. Philautus is naturally indignant at the turn affairs have taken, and the former friends exchange letters of recrimination, in which, however, their embittered feelings are concealed beneath a vast display of classical learning. But Nemesis, swift and sudden, awaits the faithless Euphues. Lucilla, it turns out, is subject to a mild form of erotomania and is constitutionally fickle, so that before her new lover has begun to realise his bliss she has already contracted a passion for some other young gentleman. Thus, struck down in the hour of his pride and passion, Euphues becomes "a