Graceful, too, are the descriptions of the landscapes in Arden, such as that of the "fair valley" where Rosalynde and Aliena found Montanus and Corydon "seeing their sheep feed, playing on their pipes many pleasant tunes, and from music and melody falling into much amorous chat." So charmingly graceful are these descriptions that, together with Shakespeare, Lodge has made the Forest of Arden almost as much the accepted home of the pastoral as Sicily and Arcadia[3] had been hitherto. [Footnote 1: P. 31.] [Footnote 2: Pp. 58 and 60.] [Footnote 3: Theocritus (283-263 B.C.) localized his "Idyls" in Sicily; Vergil (70-19 B.C.), his "Eclogues" in Arcadia.] _Lodge's Skill as a Story-teller._ To say that Lodge is a skillful as well as a graceful story-teller is, of course, to make an indefensible assertion. In the sixteenth century English fiction was still in its infancy, and English prose was still undeveloped. Yet we do find in Lodge certain qualities of style that show clearly an advance over the formlessness of some of the stories that had preceded. Though the sentence and paragraph structure is loose and amorphous, the transitions from one subject to another are almost invariably well made, or at least are clearly marked. Phrases such as, "But leaving him so desirous of the journey, to Torismond"[1]; "Leaving her to her new entertained fancies, again to Rosader"[2]; "where we leave them, and return again to Torismond"[3]; show clearly a growing regard for the value of clear arrangement, to which the earlier romancers had been indifferent. In the avoidance of digressions, too, Lodge's style is an improvement upon that of his predecessors, and even upon that of most of his contemporaries.[4] The story moves along, if not rapidly, at least continuously from start to finish. There is a gratifying lack of such preposterous complications and tortuous windings as we meet with in the plot of Greene's "Menaphon," for example, where it sometimes seems doubtful whether the characters ever will emerge from so mazy a labyrinth of plot, and where the reader is bewildered by the almost complete lack of unity in the story. [Footnote 1: P. 12.] [Footnote 2: P. 17.] [Footnote 3: P. 50. See, also, pp. 19, 41, 51, 59, 73, 97, 104.] [Footnote 4: On page 72 Lodge accuses himself of digressing; but the four lines in which he here anticipates the conclusion of the story seem not to warrant the charge.]