Chapter Etzel to Euphues of E by Brewer's Readers Handbook

The same tale is told of Xantippê (not the wife of Socratês), who preserved the life of her father Cimonos in prison. The guard, astonished that the old man held out so long, set a watch and discovered the secret.

There is a dungeon, in whose dim drear light
What do I gaze on? …
An old man, and a female young and fair,
Fresh as a nursing mother, in whose veins
The blood is nectar …
Here youth offers to old age the food,
The milk of his own gift … It is her sire,
To whom she renders back the debt of blood.
   —Byron: Childe Harold, iv. 148 (1817).

Euphrasy, the herb eye-bright; so called because it was once supposed to be efficacious in clearing the organs of sight. Hence the archangel Michael purged the eyes of Adam with it, to enable him to see into the distant future. See Milton: Paradise Lost, xi. 414–421 (1665).

Euphues, the chief character in John Lilly’s Euphuês or The Anatomy of Wit (1581), and Euphuês and his England (1582). He is an Athenian gentleman, distinguished for his elegance, wit, love-making, and roving habits. Shakespeare borrowed his “government of the bees” (Henry V. act i. sc. 2) from Lilly. Euphuês was designed to exhibit the style affected by the gallants of England in the reign of queen Elizabeth. Thomas Lodge wrote a novel in a similar style, called Euphuês Golden Legacy (1590).

(Euphues and Lucilla, published in 1716, is by some supposed to be a posthumous work of John Lilly.)

N.B.—Lilly’s Euphues have given to the language the words euphuism (stilted fine writing) and euphuist (one who imitates the style of Euphues). This sort of affectation in writing pervaded many of our novels more or less even to the early part of the nineteenth century.

(Foster’s Essays, 1805, 1819, were every bit as bad for their bad taste and grandiloquence, and elaborate fustian.)

“The commonwealth of your bees,” replied Euphuês, “did so delight me that I was not a little sorry that either their estates have not been longer, or your leisure more; for, in my simple judgment, there was such an orderly government that men may not be ashamed to imitate it.”—Lilly: Euphues (1581).

(The romances of Calprenéde and Scudéri bear the same relation to the jargon of Louis XIV. as the Euphues of Lilly to that of queen Elizabeth.)