Christ the word seems to have become accepted in Latin as covering short descriptive poems of very diverse characters, for the early MSS. of Ausonius contain a section of "Edyllia," which embraces some of the most admirable of the miscellaneous pieces of that writer. But that Ausonius himself called his poems "idyls" is highly doubtful. Indeed, it is not certain that the heading is not a mistake for "Epyllia." The word was revived at the Renaissance and applied rather vaguely to Latin and Greek imitations of Theocritus and of Virgil. It was also applied to modern poems of a romantic and pastoral character published by such writers as Tasso in Italy, Montemayor in Portugal and Ronsard in French. In 1658 the English critic, Edward Phillips, defined an "idyl" as "a kind of eclogue," but it was seldom used to describe a modern poem. Mme Deshoulières published a series of seven _Idylles_ in 1675, and Boileau makes a vague reference to the form. The sentimental German idyls of Salomon Gessner (in prose, 1758) and Voss (in hexameters, 1800) were modelled on Theocritus. Goethe's _Alexis und Dora_ is an idyl. It appears that the very general use, or abuse, of the word in the second half of the 19th century, both in English and French, arises from the popularity of two works, curiously enough almost identical in date, by two eminent and popular poets. The _Idylles héroïques_ (1858) of Victor de Laprade and the _Idylls_ of the King (1859) of Tennyson enjoyed a success in either country which led to a wide imitation of the title among those who had, perhaps, a very inexact idea of its meaning. Among modern Germans, Berthold Auerbach and Jeremias Gotthelf have been prominent as the composers of sentimental idyls founded on anecdotes of village-life. On the whole, it is impossible to admit that the idyl has a place among definite literary forms. Its character is vague and has often been purely sentimental, and our conception of it is further obscured by the fact that though the noun carries no bucolic idea with it in English, the adjective ("idyllic") has come to be synonymous with pastoral and rustic. (E. G.)