One of the numerous resemblances between the two, and one which, considering their respective positions in the history of the French and English novel, is most interesting, is the strong philosophical and specially Platonic influence which the Renaissance exercised on both.[142] Sidney, however full of it elsewhere, put less of it in his actual novel; while, on the other hand, nothing did so much to create and spread the rather rococo notion of pseudo-platonic love in France, and from France throughout Europe, as the _Astree_ itself. The further union of the philosophic mind with an eminently cavalier temperament--the united _ethos_ of scholar, soldier, lover, and courtier--fills out the comparison: and dwarfs such merely mechanical things as the mixed use of prose and verse (which both may have taken, nay pretty certainly did take, from Montemayor) and the pastoralities, for which they in the same way owed royalty to the Spaniard, to Tasso, to Sannazar, and to the Greek romances, let alone Theocritus and Virgil. And, to confine ourselves henceforward to our own special subject, it is this double infusion of idealism--of spiritual and intellectual enthusiasm on the one hand and practical fire of life and act on the other--which makes the great difference, not merely between the _Astree_ and its predecessors of the _Amadis_ class, but between it and its successors the strictly "Heroic" romances, though these owe it so much. The first--except in some points of passion--hardly touch reality at all; the last are perpetually endeavouring to simulate and insinuate a sort of reality under cover of adventures and conventions which, though fictitious, are hardly at all fantastic. But the _Astree_ might almost be called a French prose _Faerie Queene_, allowing for the difference of the two nations, languages, vehicles, and _milieux_ generally, in its representation of the above-mentioned cavalier-philosophic _ethos_--a thing never so well realised in France as in England or in Spain, but of which Honore d'Urfe, from many traits in life and book, seems to have been a real example, and which certainly vindicates its place in history and literature. [Sidenote: Its appearance and its author's other work.]