THE Pastoral, whose influence touches even the Elizabethan novels not professedly Arcadian, had been fished up from sunken antiquity by the early scholars of the Renaissance. They were fascinated by the serene country pieces of Virgil, and the leafy embroideries of Theocritus, and were, of course, too newly learned, too eager for the name of learning, to be able to apply the old form to their own material. Instead, they did their best to write not only in a classical manner, but also of a classical country. They used Greek names, Latin names, any but homespun names of their own times. It was not on purpose that Arcadia was set by them in the Golden Age; they had aimed at a century more prosaic. The best time of all the world had a date for them, and they did their best to live up to its particular antiquity. But in using conventions so different from real life, in a time of hurry and stress, it was natural that they should be led into daydreams of a greater simplicity than their own elaborate existence. It was natural, too, that by refining character, tempering the wind, and keeping the year at its sweetest season, they should end in the making of books that were beyond all measure artificial. From the time of Boccaccio to the time of Cervantes these books had multiplied, and become more and more like arrangements of marionettes in landscapes dotted with Noah's Ark trees, until, when the curate in Don Quixote's library defends them to the niece and calls them 'ingenious books that can do nobody any prejudice,' the niece hurriedly replies, 'Oh! good sir, burn them with the rest I beseech you; for should my uncle get cured of his knight-errant frenzy, and betake himself to the reading of these books, we should have him turn shepherd, and so wander through the woods and fields; nay, and what would be worse yet, turn poet, which they say is a catching and incurable disease.' [Shepherds' plaints.] The niece was right, for when shepherds love sweet shepherdesses, it seems that for the benefit of a Renaissance public they must pour their sorrows out in verse, as elegant and classical as may be. No sooner does one shepherd begin his song than another joins him and another, until there is a chorus of complaining lovers; the infection is so virulent that it leaps from man to man, and if a shepherd-boy breathe a poem to his lass, it is great odds that she will cap it with another, and then they will keep it up between them like a shuttlecock. The disease is so strong indeed that if poor Corydon has no one to cross Muses with, it forces Echo herself to answer him in rhyme:--