of the rhetoricians to choose some subject for declamation and round it
to encourage their pupils to set embellishments and decorations, which
commonly proceeded rather from a delight in language for language's
sake, than from any effect in enforcing an argument. Their models for
these exercises can be traced in their influence on later writers. One
of the most popular of them, Erasmus's "Discourse Persuading a Young Man
to Marriage," which was translated in an English text-book of rhetoric,
reminds one of the first part of Shakespeare's sonnets. The literary
affectation called euphuism was directly based on the precepts of the
handbooks on rhetoric; its author, John Lyly, only elaborated and made
more precise tricks of phrase and writing, which had been used as
exercises in the schools of his youth. The prose of his school, with its
fantastic delight in exuberance of figure and sound, owed its
inspiration, in its form ultimately to Cicero, and in the decorations
with which it was embellished, to the elder Pliny and later writers of
his kind. The long declamatory speeches and the sententiousness of the
early drama were directly modelled on Seneca, through whom was faintly
reflected the tragedy of Greece, unknown directly or almost unknown to
English readers. Latinism, like every new craze, became a passion, and
ran through the less intelligent kinds of writing in a wild excess. Not
much of the literature of this time remains in common knowledge, and for
examples of these affectations one must turn over the black letter pages
of forgotten books. There high-sounding and familiar words are handled
and bandied about with delight, and you can see in volume after volume
these minor and forgotten authors gloating over the new found treasure
which placed them in their time in the van of literary success. That
they are obsolete now, and indeed were obsolete before they were dead,
is a warning to authors who intend similar extravagances. Strangeness
and exoticism are not lasting wares. By the time of "Love's Labour Lost"
they had become nothing more than matter for laughter, and it is only