No one nowadays is likely to set any high value upon such eclogues as Pope’s _Pastorals_. Even Spenser’s _Shepheard’s Calender_ is rather talked of than read. Sidney’s _Arcadia_ has had its day. But it is otherwise with a nobler species of composition which arose out of pastorals, to wit, the pastoral elegy. Theocritus and his disciples, Bion and Moschus, all compose poetic laments for a lost shepherd, either an imaginary Daphnis or a real friend lately dead. To this original conception we owe certain English poems which we could not spare. They include the _Lycidas_ of Milton, on the death of his friend King, the _Adonais_ of Shelley, on the death of Keats, the _Thyrsis_ of Matthew Arnold, on the death of Clough. The _Daphnaida_ of Spenser was apparently the first of such elegiac pastorals. Another is his _Astrophel_, “on the death of the most noble and valorous knight, Sir Philip Sidney.” Dryden, too, did not disdain to write a pastoral elegy on the death of a supposed Amyntas, in which he sings his dirge in the good old style of the Sicilians. A more refined, more distant and subtle development from the same original is Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_. Finally we may take leave of this rural style with brief mention of the fact that Tennyson’s _Œnone_ is in essence a pastoral idyll, inspired by the second of Theocritus. We may also turn again to literary criticism. It is a significant thing that, no sooner had Sir John Cheke studied Greek and become its first regular professor at Cambridge, than he forthwith published maxims on the avoidance of bombast and pedantry in style. He had been to the fountain heads of criticism, to the Greek of Aristotle and Longinus. From that day down to the days of Matthew Arnold, in “essays in criticism” Greek principles have everywhere been theoretically worshipped, however much they may have been violated in practice. Following on the revival of Greek learning came a rage to discuss the _rationale_ of the poetic art, as well as to exemplify its various forms. In the Elizabethan age Puttenham wrote on the _Art of English Poesie_; Sidney composed a _Defence of Poesie_. Later on Dryden put forth a prose treatise Of _Dramatic Poesie_, and the Earl of Roscommon an _Essay on Translated Verse_. Dryden expressly declares that true criticism began with the Greeks in the _Poetics_ of Aristotle. He says: Such once were critics; such the happy few Athens and Rome in better ages knew. The mighty Stagirite first left the shore, Spread all his sails, and durst the deep explore; He steered securely, and discovered far, Led by the light of the Maeonian star. Pope followed with an _Essay on Criticism_, Shelley contributed a critical _Defence of Poetry_; and since that date books, essays, articles have showered upon us, in one and all of which we are assured with increasing urgency that the true principles of literary art are the principles of Athens, the principles of Greek literature at its best.