In the history of story-telling it is not the form of the pastoral that is important, but the motive that gave it its popularity. We begin to understand the motive when we notice that it became the fashion to hide real people under the names of Corydon and Phyllis, and to put ribboned crooks and silver horns into the hands of enemies and friends. At first it was the genuine feeling that made Boccaccio enshrine his Fiammetta; at the end it degenerated into mere privy gossip and books uninteresting without their keys; but in general it was simply a desire of flattering elaborate people into thinking themselves of simple heart. [The motive of the Pastoral.] The pastorals were like the paintings of Watteau and Lancret, where we find the ladies of a lively court playing innocent games under the trees, while, if we searched in the brushwood, we should find in the soft earth under the brambles the hoofmarks of the sporting satyrs. The feelings of author and subjects were those of the Vicar of Wakefield's family when they sat before the portrait painter:--'Olivia would be drawn as an Amazon, sitting upon a bank of flowers, dressed in a green Joseph richly laced with gold, and a whip in her hand. Sophia was to be a shepherdess, with as many sheep as the painter could put in for nothing.' Elizabethan ladies liked to think of themselves sitting on banks garlanding flowers, troubled only by the sweet difficulties of love, and with innumerable sheep, since the writer was able to put them in so very inexpensively. [Poussin's _Les Bergers d'Arcadie_.] There is another artist who, living before Cervantes and Sidney were dead, gives in his pictures, cleaner and sweeter than Watteau, an idea of the pastoral spirit. You can imagine one of Watteau's shepherdesses using paint. It would be impossible to suspect the same of one of Sidney's, or of one of Nicolas Poussin's, that solemn, sweet-minded man who was shocked as if by sacrilege at Scarron's irreverent treatment of Virgil. There is in the Louvre (how many times have I been to see it) a picture called 'Les Bergers d'Arcadie.' Hazlitt mentions it, most inaccurately as to facts, but most precisely as to feeling, in his essay on the painter:[6]--'But above all, who shall celebrate in terms of fit praise, his picture of the shepherds in the Vale of Tempe going out on a fine morning in the spring, and coming to a tomb with this inscription: _Et Ego in Arcadia vixi!_ The eager curiosity of some, the expression of others who start back with fear and surprise, the clear breeze playing with the branches of the shadowing trees, "the valleys low where the mild zephyrs use," the distant, uninterrupted, sunny prospects speak (and for ever will speak on) of ages past to ages yet to come!'