An older representative of the society story is the pastoral romance, once a very popular form of the love tale. In it we have a picture of country life, but it is not the hard, toil-beleaguered life of the real peasant. It is the imaginary out-of-doors living-for-a-few-days of the courtier who masquerades as a shepherd and sits cavalierly on a grassy bank with a golden crook in his hand, sighing out his heart in silvery madrigals. His lady-love is no ordinary milk-maid, but a courtly princess on vacation. In this romantic land of shepherd loves, nothing realistic enters. The talk in even the first examples is philosophic and in the later becomes euphuistic as well. The critics maintain that the pastoral romance as a type does not go more than ten years back of the middle of the fourteenth century, although we have "Aucassin and Nicolette" of the thirteenth and "Daphnis and Chloe" of the fifth. The prime fact of the history of the pastoral romance as a society story is that it grew up as a revolt against the licentious realism of the Italian novellieri. The "Arcadia" by Sannazaro, written about 1500, is the book that made the epoch and established the rule for pastoral romance in all languages. Sannazaro took what had been foreshadowed by Boccaccio in the "Ameto" in 1340, and, enriching it with elements derived from Theocritus and Virgil, created the "perfect" example. From Sannazaro, Sir Philip Sidney borrowed the spirit, many episodes, and part of the name for his notable combination of prose and verse--the "Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia." Shakespeare, too, derived much from this important Italian book. For one thing, he took the name Ophelia; for another, his charming society pastoral drama "As You Like It" goes historically back to Sannazaro's "Arcadia" for its lyrics, out-of-doors courting, its real shepherds, its obvious love of nature, its touch of magic, and its wholesome morality. The lack of allegorical significance is also straight example from Sannazaro; but the love chain, the disguised shepherd princesses, the humorous element in connection with the coarse shepherds, a touch of adventure, and the cavalier tone are of later Spanish and English contamination, immediately through Lodge's prose romance "Rosalynd," and more remotely through Greene's three pastorals--"England's Mourning Garment," "Menaphon," and "Pandosto,"--and through Cervantes's "Galatea" and Montemayor's "Diana," and Ribeyro's Portuguese "Fragments." Though the pastoral romance, as we notice, became more and more artificial, it always remained pure in tone. It centered itself in idealism and stood against the low, utterly debased, more realistic novella, which was its predecessor and continued rival for popularity. The pastoral held the field as the chief and most influential prose form in Spain until the picaresque romance came to be recognized as a distinct genre. [Suggestions for writing]