Some people, it is believed, have denied that _Euphues_ is a novel at all; and some of these some have been almost indignant at its being called one. It is certainly, with _Rasselas_, the most remarkable example, in English, of a novel which is to a great extent deprived of the _agrémens_ to which we have for some two centuries been accustomed in the kind, and, to a still greater, loaded with others which do not appeal to us. To put aside altogether its extraordinary and in a way epoch-making style, which gives it its main actual place in the history of English literature, it is further loaded with didactic digressions which, though certain later novelists have been somewhat peccant in the kind, have never been quite equalled--no, not in _Rasselas_ itself or the _Fool of Quality_. But if anybody, who has the necessary knowledge to understand, and therefore the necessary patience to tolerate, these knotty knarry envelopes, insertions, and excrescences, will for the moment pay no attention to them, but merely strip them off, he will find the carcass of a very tolerable novel left behind. The first plot of Philautus--Euphues--Lucilla, and the successive jilting of the two friends for each other and for Curio, is no mean novel-substance. Not Balzac himself, certainly no one of his successors, need disdain it: and more than one of them has taken up something like it. The journey from Naples to London, and the episode of Fidus and Iffida, could have been worked up, in the good old three-volume days, to a most effective second volume. And the picture of the court, with the further loves of Philautus, Camilla, and the "violet" Frances, would supply a third of themselves even if Euphues were left out, though some livelier presentation of his character (which Lyly himself was obviously too much personally interested to make at all clear) would improve the whole immensely. But it was still too early: the thing was not yet to be done. Only, I do not know any book in which the possibilities, and even the outlines, of this thing were indicated and vaguely sketched earlier in any European language, unless it be the _Lucretia and Euryalus_ of Æneas Silvius, which is much more confined in its scope. The fact is that the very confusedness, the many undeveloped sides, of _Euphues_, make it much more of an ancestor of the modern novel than if it were more of a piece. The _quicquid agunt homines_ is as much the province of the novel as of the satire; and there is more than something of this as it affected Elizabethan times in _Euphues_. Men's interest in morals, politics, and education; their development of the modern idea of society; their taste for letters; their conceits and fancies--all these appear in it.