In the _Apologie for Poetry_, Sidney condemned Euphuism, {xviii} Lyly’s new-fangled speech, which became fashionable in all cultivated circles immediately upon the publication of _Euphues, or the Anatomie of Wit_, in 1579; but his own affectations are equally alien from purity of style. Both were striving after a prose having a richness, a style of ornament, and an artistic structure, that would furnish some equivalent for the charms to ear and mind of metrical language. In this they were simply repeating the attempt of the late Greek and Latin novelists, whose style anticipated many of the mannerisms of Elizabethan prose, the false antitheses, the word-jingles, the artificial cadences, and alliteration. Phrases like, “Sine pretio pretiosae,” “Amores amare coerceas,” “Atra atria Proserpinae,” in the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius, are marvellously like the flowers of speech affected by Sidney and Lyly. The scholiasts used to arrange the prose of this author in iambic measures, and would no doubt have applied similar tests to Sidney’s. And the fondness for involved, musical periods, the love of sensuousness and splendour, are features common to both schools of writers. Here are two sentences from Apuleius showing precisely the same effort to maintain the glories of poetry, and the same cloying rhetoric that is the result in Sidney and his contemporaries:-- “Mirus prorsus homo, immo semideus, vel certe Deus, qui magnae artis subtilitate tantum efferavit argentum … ut diem suum sibi domus faciat, licet sole nolente: sic cubicula, sic porticus, sic ipsae valvae fulgurant.” “Namque saxum immani magnitudine procerum, et inaccessa salebritate lubricum, mediis e faucibus lapidis fontes horridos evomebat: qui statim proni foraminis lacunis editi, perque proclive delapsi, et angusti canalis exerto contecti tramite, proximam convallem latenter incidebant.” Apuleius might very well have written such a sentence as this:-- “Yet the pitiless sword had such pity of so precious an object that at first it did but hit flatlong. But little availed that, since the lady falling down astonished withal, the cruel villain forced the sword with another blow to divorce the fair marriage of the head and body.” And in spite of Sidney’s strictures upon the conceits of {xix} Euphuism, there was not much to choose between Lyly and such extravagances as this:-- “Exceedingly sorry for Pamela, but exceedingly exceeding that exceedingness in fear for Philoclea.”