The _Arcadia_ is cited in Iwan Bloch’s _Sex Life in England_ as the first instance of lesbian love in English literature, but Bloch bases his claim on a night the princess and her sister spent together. He does not mention that they were sisters; however, it is not the kinship which invalidates his statement. It is true that the text reads: “... there cherishing one another with deere, though chaste embracements, with sweet, though cold kisses; it might seem that Love was come to play him there without darte; or that weerie of his owne fires, he was there to refresh himselfe betweene their sweete-breathing lippes.” But the reason for their embrace was that both were suffering from hopeless loves, and, too shy to share confidences even by candlelight, had agreed that “they might talke better as they lay together.” Bloch, however, makes his point from the statement that “they impoverished their cloathes to inriche their bed, which for that night might well scorne the shrine of Venus,” interpreting this to mean that they made elaborate preparation for a night of love, however cold and chaste Sidney claimed it to be.[11] The proper sense of the elaborate Elizabethan conceit is, of course, simply that they released their own loveliness from their garments and laid themselves on the bed which was thus more “inriched” than a shrine bearing an image of Venus herself. A French pastoral making use of the same theme is d’Urfé’s _Astrée_, published serially between 1607 and 1620. This vast work, running to some 5500 pages, has not been examined, but Maurice Magendie’s _L’Astrée d’Honoré D’Urfé_ gives an adequate notion of its significant points. Laid in Merovingian times, it is bound anachronistically by the strictest rules of courtly love, which made a lady’s lightest word law for her lover. Thus, once banished by his offended lady’s decree, the hero Céladon may not re-enter her presence without specific summons. After a volume of misadventure he contrives to return by impersonating Alexis, daughter of a Druid priest whose casuistry reconciles him to this evasion of Astrée’s orders. Since Astrée has long mourned him as dead she is unlikely to summon him, but until she does, “Alexis” cannot reveal his identity. Her new friend’s phenomenal resemblance to her lost lover provokes in Astrée an infatuation which, however well accounted for, is our first example since classical times of a woman’s passion without scruple for one believed from the outset to be of her own sex.