EUPHUISM, the peculiar mode of speaking and writing brought into fashion in England towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth by the vogue of the fashionable romance of Euphues, published in 1578 by John Lyly. As early as 157o Ascham in his Schoolmaster had said that "Euphues" (i.e., a man well endowed by nature, from the Gr. Ev, ckvii well, growth) is "he that is apt by goodness of wit, and applicable by readiness of will, to learning, having all other qualities of the mind and parts of the body that must another day serve learning." Lyly adopted this word as the name of the hero of his romance, and it is with him that the vogue of Euphuism began. He addressed himself to "the gentlewomen of England," and he had the audacity, in that grave age, to say that he would rather see his books "lie shut in a lady's casket than open in a scholar's study." Lyly was 26 when he published in 1579 the first part of Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit: a second part, entitled Euphues and his England, appeared in 1580.
For a comprehension of the nature of Euphuism it is necessary to remember that the object of its invention was to attract and to disarm the ladies by means of an ingenious and playful style, of high artificiality, which should give them the idea that they were being entertained by an enthusiastic adorer, not instructed by a solemn pedagogue. For so years the romance of Euphues retained its astonishing popularity. As late as 1632 the publisher, Edward Blount (156o?-163 2 ), recalling the earliest enthusiasm of the public, wrote of John Lyly, "Oblivion shall not so trample on a son of the Muses, and such a son as they called their darling. Our nation are in his debt for a new English which he taught them. Euphues and his England began first that language. All our ladies were then his scholars, and that beauty in Court, which could not parley Euphuism, was as little regarded, as she which, now there, speaks not French." Among those who applied themselves to this "new English," was Queen Elizabeth herself, styled by J. R. Green "the most affected and detestable of Euphuists." Euphuism did not attempt to render the simplicity of nature. On the contrary, in order to secure refinement, it sought to be as affected, as artificial, as high-pitched as possible. Its most promi nent feature was an incessant balancing of phrases in chains of antitheses, thus:— "Though the tears of the hart be salt, yet the tears of the boar be sweet, and though the tears of some women be counterfeit to deceive, yet the tears of many be current to try their love." Another of the main characteristics of Euphuism was the incessant use, for purposes of ornament, of similes taken from fabulous records of zoology, or relating to mythical birds, fishes or minerals. This was a feature which was excessively admired. That lady was considered most proficient in Euphuism who could keep up longest these chains of similes taken out of fabulous natural history. Alliteration was also a particular ornament of the Euphuistic style, as : "The bavin, though it burn bright, is but a blaze," but the use of this artifice by Lyly himself was rarely ex aggerated; for instances of its excess we turn to his imitators.
The earliest instance of the word "Euphuism" which has been traced occurs in a letter written by Gabriel Harvey in 1592, when he speaks of a man, who would be smart, as talking "a little Euphuism." Dekker, in the Gull's Hornbook of 1609, uses the word as an adjective, and denounces "Euphuised gentlewomen." When the practice was going out of fashion we find it thus severely stigmatized by Michael Drayton, a poet who had little sympathy with the artificial refinement of Lyly. In an elegy, printed in 1627, Drayton refers to the merit of Sir Philip Sidney, who recalled English prose to sanity, and "did first reduce Our tongue from Lyly's writings then in use, Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies, Playing with words and idle similes, As th' English apes and very zanies be Of everything that they do hear and see, So imitating his ridiculous tricks They spake and writ, all like mere lunatics." This severe censure of Euphuism may serve to remind us that hasty critics have committed an error in supposing the Arcadia of Sidney to be composed in the fashionable jargon.
Lyly found in Greene, Lodge, Dickenson, Nicholas Breton and others, enthusiastic disciples who had learned all the formulas of Euphuism, and could bring them forth as fluently and elegantly as he could himself. Nevertheless the trick wore out, with the taste that it had created, by the close of the reign of James I.
Critics have not failed to insist, on the other hand, that a species of Euphuism existed before Euphues was thought of. It has been supposed that a translation of the familiar epistles, or, as they were called, the "Golden Letters," of a Spanish monk, Antonio de Guevara, led Lyly to conceive the extraordinary style which bears the name of his hero. Between 1574 and 1578 Edward Hellowes (fl. 1550-1600) translated into a very extravagant English prose three of the works of Guevara. Earlier than this, in 1557, Sir Thomas North had published a version of the same Spanish writer's Reloj de Principes (The Dial of Princes), a moral and philosophical romance not without a certain likeness in plan and language to Euphues.