Note 62 — V.—EARLY DRAMATIC EFFORTS

In later life Shakespeare, in Hamlet, borrows from Lyly’s Euphues Polonius’s advice to Laertes; but, however he may have regarded the moral sentiment of that didactic romance, he had no respect for the affectations of its prose style, which he ridiculed in a familiar passage in I Henry IV, II. iv. 445: ‘For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.’