John Lyly’s Euphuistic Style

1. John Lyly’s Euphuistic Style • I thought it too bad for the press and too good for the pack. • Gentlemen use books as gentlewomen handle their flow’rs, who in the morning stick them in their heads, and at night straw them at their heels. • Cherries be fulsome when they be through ripe, bicause they be plenty, and books be stale when they be printed, in that they be common. • In my mind printers and tailors are bound chiefly to pray for gentlemen: the one hath so many fantasies to print, the other such divers fashions to make, that the pressing-iron of one is never out of the fire, nor the printing press of the other any time lieth still. • But a fashion is but a day’s wearing, and a book but an hour’s reading, which seeing it is so, I am of a shoemaker’s mind, who careth not so the shoe hold the plucking on, nor I so my labors last the running over. • He that cometh in print bicause he would be known is like the fool that cometh into the market bicause he would be seen. • Envy braggeth but draweth no blood; the malicious have more mind to quip than might to cut. • I submit myself to the judgment of the wise, and I little esteem the censure of fools. • The one will be satisfied with reason, the other are to be answered with silence.

2. Copychanging Lyly Lyly: I thought it too bad for the press and too good for the pack. • Copychange: I thought it too trite for the learned and too hard for the lazy. Lyly: Gentlemen use books as gentlewomen handle their flow’rs, who in the morning stick them in their heads, and at night straw them at their heels. • Copychange: Ambitious people treatmorality as aerialists handle balloons, who inflate them to enjoy being able to ascend and empty them to avoid having to stay aloft.