"Eloquent and witty" John Lyly first saw light in the year 1553 or 1554[3]. Anthony à Wood, the 17th century author of _Athenae Oxonienses_, tells us that he was, like his contemporary Stephen Gosson, a Kentish man born[4]; and with this clue to help them both Mr Bond and Mr Baker are inclined to accept much of the story of Fidus as autobiographical[5]. If their inference be correct, our author would seem to have been the son of middle-class, but well-to-do, parents. But it is with his residence at Oxford that any authentic account of his life must begin, and even then our information is very meagre. Wood tells us that he "became a student in Magdalen College in the beginning of 1569, aged 16 or thereabouts." "And since," adds Mr Bond, "in 1574 he describes himself as Burleigh's alumnus, and owns obligations to him, it is possible that he owed his university career to Burleigh's assistance[6]." And yet, limited as our knowledge is, it is possible, I think, to form a fairly accurate conception of Lyly's manner of life at Oxford, if we are bold enough to read between the lines of the scraps of contemporary evidence that have come down to us. Lyly himself tells us that he left Oxford for three years not long after his arrival. "Oxford," he says, "seemed to weane me before she brought me forth, and to give me boanes to gnawe, before I could get the teate to suck. Wherein she played the nice mother in sending me into the countrie to nurse, where I tyred at a drie breast for three years and was at last inforced to weane myself." Mr Bond, influenced by the high moral tone of _Euphues_, which, as we shall see, was merely a traditional literary prose borrowed from the moral court treatise, is anxious to vindicate Lyly from all charges of lawlessness, and refuses to admit that the foregoing words refer to rustication[7]. Lyly's enforced absence he holds was due to the plague which broke out at Oxford at this time. Such an interpretation seems to me to be sufficiently disposed of by the fact that the plague in question did not break out until 1571[8], while Lyly's words must refer to a departure (at the very latest) in 1570. Everything, in fact, goes to show that he was out of favour with the University authorities. In the first place he seems to have paid small attention to his regular studies. To quote Wood again, he was "always averse to the crabbed studies of Logic and Philosophy. For so it was that his genie, being naturally bent to the pleasant paths of poetry (as if Apollo had given to him a wreath of his own Bays without snatching or struggling), did in a manner neglect academical studies, yet not so much but that he took the Degree in Arts, that of Master being completed in 1575[9]." [3] Bond, I. p. 2; Baker, p. v. [4] _Ath. Ox._ (ed. Bliss), I. p. 676. [5] _Euphues_, p. 268. [6] Bond, I. p. 6. But Baker, pp. vii, viii, would seem to disagree with this. [7] Bond, I. p. 11. [8] Baker, p. xii.