"Alas!" I answered, "this thought has often disturbed me. I have myself seen and felt, in common with all civilized beings, that primitive life was the dream and ideal of all men and all times. From the shepherds of Longus down to those of Trianon, pastoral life has been a perfumed Eden, where souls wearied and harassed by the tumult of the world have sought a refuge. Art, which has always flattered and fawned upon the too fortunate among mankind, has passed through an unbroken series of _pastorals_. And under the title of 'The History of Pastorals' I have often wished to write a learned and critical work, in which to review all the different rural dreams to which the upper classes have so fondly clung. "I should follow their modifications, which are always in inverse relation to the depravity of morals, for they become innocent and sentimental in proportion as society is shameless and corrupt. I should like to _order_ this book of a writer better qualified than I to accomplish it, and then I should read it with delight. It should be a complete treatise on art; for music, painting, architecture, literature in all its forms, the theater, poetry, romances, eclogues, songs, fashions, gardens, and even dress, have been influenced by the infatuation for the pastoral dream. All the types of the golden age, the shepherdesses of Astræa, who are first nymphs and then marchionesses, and who pass through the Lignon of Florian, wear satin and powder under Louis XV., and are put into sabots by Sedaine at the end of the monarchy, are all more or less false, and seem to us to-day contemptible and ridiculous. We have done with them, and see only their ghosts at the opera; and yet they once reigned at court and were the delight of kings, who borrowed from them the shepherd's crook and scrip. "I have often wondered why there are no more shepherds, for we are not so much in love with the truth lately that art and literature can afford to despise the old conventional types rather than those introduced by the present mode. To-day we are devoted to force and brutality, and on the background of these passions we embroider decorations horrible enough to make our hair stand on end if we could take them seriously."