For some time, as almost everybody knows, these collections of translated matter served a purpose--great indeed, but somewhat outside their proper department--by furnishing the Elizabethan dramatists with a large part--perhaps the larger part--of their subjects. But they very soon began to exercise it directly by suggesting the fictitious part of the prose pamphlet--a department which, though infinitely less well known than the plays, and still not very easy to know, holds almost the second position as representing the popular literature of the Elizabethan time. And they also had--in one case certainly, in the other probably--no little influence upon the two great Elizabethan works which in a manner founded the modern novel and the modern romance in English--the _Euphues_ of Lyly and the _Arcadia_ of Sir Philip Sidney.
The pamphlet stories (which are themselves often play-connected, as in the case of Lodge's _Rosalynde_ and Greene's _Pandosto_) do not require much notice, with one exception--Nash's _Jack Wilton or the Unfortunate Traveller_, to which some have assigned a position equal, or perhaps superior in our particular subject, to that of the _Arcadia_ or that of _Euphues_. This seems to the present writer a mistake: but as to appear important is (in a not wholly unreal sense) to be so, the piece shall be separately considered. The rest are mostly marred by a superabundance of rather rudimentary art, and a very poor allowance of matter. There is hardly any character, and except in a few pieces, such as Lodge's _Margarite of America_, there is little attempt to utilise new scenes and conditions. But the whole class has special interest for us in one peculiarity which makes it perhaps unreadable to any but students, and that is its saturation with the Elizabethan conceit and word-play which is sometimes called Euphuism. Nor is this wonderful, considering that more than one of these "pamphlets" is directly connected with the matter and the personages of _Euphues_ itself. To this famous book, therefore, we had better turn.
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.