We find that the genuine sort of this kind of superfine conversation was originally called "Euphues," simply, as Overbury speaks of a man "who speaks Euphues, not so gracefully as heartily." 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. That was certainly not the intention of the author, and in fact the publication of the _Arcadia_, eleven years after that of _Euphues_, marks the beginning of the downfall of the popularity of the latter. Sidney's prose, it is true, was extremely ornamented, but it was instinct with romantic fancy, and it affected a chivalrous and florid fulness which was artificial enough, but wholly distinct from the more homely elegance of Euphuism as we have defined it. The publication of the _Arcadia_ was a severe blow to the Euphuists. Immediately the ladies began to desert their former favourite, and the object at court became, as Ben Jonson noted, to "observe as pure a phrase and use as choice figures in ordinary conference as any be in the Arcadia." But, in the meantime, Lyly had 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, and by the close of the reign of James I. Euphuism had become a dead language.