The work of Italy in this century—the “Cinquecento”—was above all things work of artistic polish. The importance attached to beauty of style and elegance of words is apt to seem to us disproportionate. We are inclined to wish that the Italian writers had explored greater heights and depths of thinking and feeling, and had grappled more closely with matters of high seriousness. We find them enlarging, elaborating, and polishing tales of romance and adventure, or scenes of beauty and romantic life. We find them revelling in descriptions, and yet, all the time, ironically playing with the very unrealities of that which they describe, often plainly hinting to us not to take the matter too seriously. Above all things they are artists in style. And, therefore, it is natural to find that words are often compassed to the neglect of the matter. This was not only so in writing, it extended to their more courtly speech. It is largely from Italy, though partly from Spain, that there came over France and England that vice of affectation which developed a special shape in Euphuism. Before the appearance of Lyly’s _Euphues_ in 1578, association with the gallants and wits of the Italian Courts had worked upon English pretenders to courtly graces. They deliberately affected forms of speech which should show both how much they knew, and how ingeniously refined they could be in novelty of phrase. Early Elizabethan literature is greatly tainted by Euphuism, with its tricks of language, alliterative, antithetical, hyperbolical, full of whimsical comparisons, overwrought descriptions, plays on words, avoiding natural forms of expression in favour of those which would show off the writer’s cultivation, his wit, and taste.