Euphuist

There he found the Euphuist in the same elegant posture of abstruse calculation which he had exhibited on the preceding evening, his arms folded in the same angle, his eyes turned up to the same cobwebs, and his heels resting on the ground as before.

The eloquence of the bar, the pulpit, and the council-board, was deformed by conceits which would have disgraced the rhyming shepherds of an Italian academy. The King quibbled on the throne. We might, indeed, console ourselves by reflecting that his Majesty was a fool. But the Chancellor quibbled in concert from the wool-sack: and the Chancellor was Francis Bacon. It is needless to mention [Philip] Sidney and the whole tribe of Euphuists. For [William] Shakspeare himself, the greatest poet that ever lived, falls into the same fault whenever he means to be particularly fine.

For a time, Euphuism had it all its own way. Elizabeth was the most affected and detestable of Euphuists; and “that beauty in Court which could not parley Euphuism,” a courtier of Charles the First’s time tells us, “was as little regarded as she that now there speaks not French.”