There is no name in Greece which raises in the mind of the ordinary reader more pleasing and more definite ideas than the name Arcadia. It has become indissolubly connected with the charms of pastoral ease and rural simplicity. The sound of the shepherd’s pipe and the maiden’s laughter, the rustling of shady trees, the murmuring of gentle fountains, the bleating of lambs and the lowing of oxen—these are the images of peace and plenty which the poets have gathered about that ideal retreat. There are none more historically false, more unfounded in the real nature and aspect of the country, and more opposed to the sentiment of the ancients. Rugged mountains and gloomy defiles, a harsh and wintry climate, a poor and barren soil, tilled with infinite patience; a home that exiled its children to seek bread at the risk of their blood, a climate more opposed to intelligence and to culture than even Bœotian fogs, a safe retreat of bears and wolves—this is the Arcadia of old Greek history. Politically it has no weight whatever till the days of Epaminondas, and the foundation of Megalopolis. Intellectually, its rise is even later, and it takes no national part in the great march of literature from Homer to Menander.(136) It was only famed for the marketable valor of its hardy mountaineers, of whom the Tegeans had held their own even against the power of Sparta, and obtained an honorable place in her army. It was also noted for rude and primitive cults, of which later men praised the simplicity and homely piety—at times also, the stern gloominess, which did not turn from the offering of human blood. I must remind the reader that rural beauty among the ancients, as well as among the Renaissance visions of an imaginary Arcadia as a rustic paradise, by no means included the wild picturesqueness which we admire in beetling cliffs and raging torrents. These were inhospitable and savage to the Greeks. It was the gentle slope, the rich pasture, the placid river framed in deep foliage—it was, in fact, landscape-scenery like the valleys of the Thames, or about the gray abbeys of Yorkshire, which satisfied their notion of perfect landscape; and in this the men of the Renaissance were perfectly agreed with them. How, then, did the false notion of our Arcadia spring up in modern Europe? How is it that even our daily papers assume this sense, and know it to be intelligible to the most vulgar public? The history of the change from the historical to the poetical conception is very curious, and worth the trouble of explaining, especially as we find it assumed in many books, but accounted for in none.