Nevertheless, when reinforced by a new development, of which we are to speak next, their chivalric virtues gave them life under a new shape in France of the seventeenth century. This new development was the pastoral romance. Our knights and their loves are now placed in the Arcady of shepherds and shepherdesses. It is the same world of chivalric impossibility of sentiment, heroism, and enchantment; but, during the vogue of the Amadises, Italy had developed the pastoral, and the increasing contact of Spain with Italy—since the acquisition of Naples—speedily brought before the Spanish writers the example of Sannazaro. From the _Arcadia_ of the Italian on the one hand, and from the _libros de caballerias_ on the other, the Portuguese-Spaniard Montemayor created his famous _Diana_. This work, like Sidney’s _Arcadia_, is partly in prose and partly in verse, and, in such English development as arose from the pastoral, the influence of the Spaniard must be reckoned with that of the Neapolitan. It appears in Spenser’s _Shepheard’s Calender_, and incidentally it may be observed that, before writing his _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, Shakespeare would seem at least to have been told of the substance of Montemayor. Not only did this influence come directly from the Spanish work, and from its translation into English at the end of the sixteenth century; it came also by way of France in the latter part of the seventeenth. For in France, early in that century, had appeared the _Astrée_ of D’Urfé, based upon the Spaniard, and this in turn was the parent of those tedious creations of sentimental affectation, the heroic romances of La Calprenède and Scudéry, which have already been mentioned in dealing with the effect of French literature upon our post-Restoration writers of drama and fiction. * * * * *