The flowering of the Elizabethan drama dates from the middle years of the queen’s reign. By this time the theatre was formed, and the taste for it was strong. It naturally attracted many writers, if only because it was the most direct and effective way in which they could make themselves heard, to say nothing of the fact that it was by far the most certainly lucrative of all forms of literature, and therefore had an intelligible attraction for all who lived by their pens. Among them it was inevitable that there should be not a few who had no natural faculty for dramatic literature--Lodge, for instance, and Nash. Both lived much about the theatre, and their relations with it, and the writers for it, figure largely in the gossiping pamphlets of the time. But they wrote for it only by necessity or accident, and their dramatic work is altogether subordinate. As much might be not unfairly said of John Lyly; but his plays are so curious, and held so considerable a place in the estimation of his time, that he cannot be put wholly aside. [SN: _Lyly._] Custom has ruled that the name of Lyly shall be followed by the words “the author of _Euphues_.” Custom has in this case decided rightly. Lyly was always the author of _Euphues_. This didactic tale falls to be discussed with the prose of the time, but we may note that it is composed of a very slight framework of story, from which blow out clouds of words arranged in quaint and not inelegant patterns. No drama can be made out of such materials, and, properly speaking, the plays of Lyly are not dramatic.[73] Unlike most of his contemporaries, he was attached to the Court, though, according to his own melancholy summing-up of the results of his labours, he obtained nothing as a reward. He was born in Kent about 1554, and was educated at Oxford. It may be that he went on to Cambridge, according to what was then a common custom. So little is known of the rest of his life that biographers have been driven to make matter by identifying him with a certain Mr Lilly, a bold, witty atheist, who harassed Hall in his first living, and whose sudden death from the plague is recorded by the satirist and future Bishop of Norwich, with pious satisfaction, among the various examples of divine intervention on his own behalf. If he sat in several Parliaments, Lyly cannot have altogether wanted means and friends. He may have lived into the reign of James I., and died in 1606. His plays were part of his service as a courtier. They were not written for the vulgar theatre, but to be performed by the “children of Paul’s” or “of the Queen’s Chapel” before the queen at the New Year feasts. Here he would have an audience which already admired his _Euphues_, published in 1580, and was well content to hear him “parle Euphuism.” To this we may partly attribute the fact that, while his contemporaries were making blank verse the vehicle of the higher English drama, he showed a marked preference for the use of