its literary parent Lord Berners, the translator of Froissart, who also Englished Guevara's book before North in 1539 (see his edition of Berners' Huon of Burdeux, E.E.T.S. iv. pp. 785-6). But Berners' version was made from the French, and it is difficult to see how the Spaniard's style could be caught except in a version made from the Spanish, as was in large measure that of North, who must therefore be regarded as the father of Euphuism, if that style is to be traced to Guevara alone. But as a matter of fact such a tendency to over-ornamentation as is shown in Euphuism came to all the literatures of West Europe as a natural development after they had passed the apprenticeship of translation, and became conscious of the delights of literary artifice.
North came just mid-way between the exaggerated Ciceronianism of Berners, Elliot, and Ascham, his chief predecessors, and the exaggerated Guevarism (if it must be so) of Lyly and his school; and because he did so, we see in him Tudor prose at its best. In the Elizabethan period our language attained both ease and dignity, but the ease of Greene and the pamphleteers was never dignified, and the dignity of such men as Hooker was rarely easeful. North
