Euphuism favour a date of composition in or near 1590. _Lillie's Light_ was licensed June 3, 1596. If printed, it is non-extant. He wrote prefatory Latin lines for Henry Lock's _Ecclesiastes_, otherwise called _The Preacher_, in 1597. In 1597-1600 the Chapel Children revived his plays. The _Maid's Metamorphosis_, incorrectly attributed to Lyly, was printed in 1600. His _Love's Metamorphosis_ was printed in 1601: it had been written about the time of the _Gallathea_,--before 1584, or between 1588 and 1591. The Protea-Petulius part is probably from a different play, or is a survival in a revision. Lyly died November 30, 1606, and was buried at St. Bartholomew's.[751] =The Place of Euphues in English Literature.=--John Lyly was poet, pamphleteer, novelist, and dramatist. As a pamphleteer he is unimportant. As a poet he can best be studied in his plays. It is, then, as novelist and dramatist that he is important. The material of the two parts of the _Euphues_ makes it decidedly significant in its own time. It is not, like most of the stories of Greene and Lodge, mere romance, nor, like Nash's _Jack Wilton_, a tale of adventure phrased with reportorial recklessness. It is a love story in which romance is subordinated to the inculcation of ideas of high living and thinking, and the demands of an involved style. It dimly foreshadows two literary products which reach a development only long after the days of Elizabeth--the novel with a purpose, and the stylistic novel. The appearance of the book was epochal. Young writers of the day--Munday, Greene, Nash, and Lodge--copied its style. Courtiers patterned their speech upon it. Yet Gabriel Harvey was probably right when he ill-naturedly wrote: "Young Euphues but hatched the egges that his elder freendes laide." The _Anatomie_, at least, is such a book as a recent university graduate of the present day, well read in some of the classics, and especially susceptible to new literary influences and cults, might compile. In the division _Euphues and His Ephœbus_ Lyly uses, with a few omissions and additions, Plutarch on _Education_; in the letter to Botonio he translates Plutarch on _Exile_. In the part _Euphues and Atheos_ he is indebted to chapters 9, 10, 11, and 12 of the _Dial of Princes_ (1529) by Antonio de Guevara, Bishop of Guadix and Mendoza. Euphues and Lucilla debate "dubii," or artificial discussions of set questions, such as one finds in Hortensio Lando or Castiglione. There is, too, almost constant use of the unnatural natural history of Pliny. All this material is bound together by a style which, though it may ultimately be traced to the rounded periods of Cicero, had developed slowly in writers of the Renaissance and the years just before _Euphues_ appeared. George Pettie, for instance, in his _Pettie Palace of Pettie His Pleasure_, published in 1576, has all the stylistic characteristics of the _Euphues_ except the fabulous natural history. It is, however, to Guevara in the _Dial of Princes_