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 fifty years the romance of _Euphues_ retained its astonishing popularity. As late as 1632 the publisher Edward Blount (1560?-1632), 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," one of the most ardent was Queen Elizabeth herself, who has been styled by J.R. Green "the most affected and destestable of euphuists." At the height of the popularity of this strange dialect, it was said by William Webbe, in his _Discourse of English Poetry_ (1586), to consist in a combination of "singular eloquence and brave composition of apt words and sentences, in fit phrases, in pithy sentences, in gallant tropes, in flowing speech," while a French poet of the same age calls Lyly a "raffineur" of the English speech; another panegyrist describes him as "_alter Tullius_," meaning that, in inventing Euphuism, he had introduced into English the refinements of a Ciceronian style.