shepherds and shepherdesses, and under that transparent veil, indulges in what is always so attractive, both to author and to readers, autobiography. Such a course offers many delights. It has its flavour of enigma, the perpetual interest of a partlyrevealed mystery. It affords abundant opportunities for the compliment discreetly insinuated, for the attack which gathers sting from its indirectness, above all, for the love poem which may dare to be warm without audacity, inasmuch as the very artificiality of the form really permits the closer approach. To Rosalind or Idea you may safely sing what Rose Dyneley or Anne Goodyere might think fit to deem impertinent. The personal note can hardly be traced now, if it ever existed, in Theocritus; but the dead shepherd of Moschus' lament is clearly his fellow-poet Bion, and in Virgil the fortunes of the poet himself are put in the mouth of Tityrus, while the adventures of his noble friends, Pollio and Gallus, are his frequent theme. The eclogues of Calpurnius are devoted to the laudation of Nero; in Petrarch, Pamphilus and Mition stand for St. Peter and Clement the Sixth; while Boccaccio introduces the Emperor and the City of Florence under the pastoral names of Daphnis and Florida. The recurrence of the same device in English pastoral is too obvious to need proof. The extent to which it was carried may best be seen in Spenser's Colin Clout's Come Home Again. Here we have Spenser himself figuring as Colin, Gabriel Harvey as Hobbinol, Raleigh as the Shepherd of the Ocean. Moreover, a large part of the poem is occupied by an account of all the poets

and the great lords and ladies whom Spenser met in London, each duly labelled with a pastoral appellative. Elizabeth heads the list as Cynthia, and the rest follow, to the number of twenty or thirty; nor can we doubt that, although many of the names are difficult for us to identify, they were all well understood by, at any rate, the inner literary circles of the day.

But from personal allusion it is only a short step to political, social, or religious allusion. At one time pastoral became allegorical, or, at the least, didactic. This phase of development belongs mainly to the beginning of the Renascence. The Pollio of Virgil is not strictly a pastoral at all. The poet admittedly leaves the humbler theme to launch into his prophecy of national greatness—

"Sicelides Musae, paullo maiora canamus".

The humanists, however, were not slow to recognize in the pastoral a powerful weapon for the purposes of satire. A large number of the eclogues contained in the volume published by Oporinus are in reality but thinly-veiled attacks upon Church and State, Papacy and Empire. Mantuan, again, is mainly concerned to moralize; a fact which doubtless explains the unexampled popularity of his work as a text-book for grammar-schools. And here comes in that easy parallel, already alluded to, between the shepherd, the pastor, and the priest or clergyman. Piers and Palinode, the disputing shepherds in the fifth eclogue of the Shepheard's Calender, stand for the Protestant and the Catholic divine; and in the seventh and ninth eclogues the

theme is repeated. literary sense of the Elizabethans that this particular mode of treating pastoral proved, on the whole, a trifle too tedious for them, and practically vanished out of account. Its influence, however, may be easily traced in the passage about 'the hungry sheep' in Milton's Lycidas.

Perhaps it speaks well for the

It is obvious that poetry which appeals to its own time, not through inherent literary qualities, but by force of personal or social allusion, must lose proportionately in its hold upon posterity. The two remaining methods by which the failing energies of pastoral have been from time to time refreshed and recreated, are not open to the same objection. They rest upon broad permanent tendencies of human nature, the twin faculties of imagination and observation, the instincts, if you will, towards realism and idealism. And these two lines of development are by no means incompatible; in the finest Elizabethan pastoral they proceed, in large measure, side by side. It was possible, while preserving the main outlines of the pastoral convention, to bring it subtly into touch with English life; substituting the scenery, the manners and customs, the legends and superstitions of our own country-side for those which so many since Theocritus had borrowed from Sicily; letting the hawthorn bloom instead of the cytisus, and the dog-rose take the place of the trailing vine. Such a process, carried too far, would end in destroying the pastoral altogether: it would lead to a new poetry of nature and rural life, such as our own century has given us. And good as this is, it is good in another way

from pastoral, whose highest function, as we shall see directly, is to paint an imaginary and not a real life. But perhaps the fault of the Elizabethans is, that they did not carry the process quite far enough. In fact, the ways of the country were a little beyond their sphere of observation. Touches of landscape, of hill and meadow, of copse and river, they give us in plenty; but the life of the peasant, as it was lived in the plains of Warwickshire or on the Wiltshire downs, was a sealed book to all but the greatest of them. Even Spenser, wearing some part of the mantle of his father, Chaucer, is not always happy in his attempts to be natural; his cumbrous English names, his fantastic Northumbrian dialect, are only clumsy instead of being rustic. Here and there, in Spenser himself, in his humbler follower Basse, in the wayward Herrick, some genuine knowledge of farm and sheepfold and village green mingles with the verse; but such impulses were always isolated, and without much effect upon the main body of pastoral literature.

On the other hand, the imaginative or idealist way of treating the pastoral appealed very strongly to the Elizabethan temper. Consider for a moment some of the social conditions of the age. City life, as we now know it, was just beginning to make itself felt as an element in English society. Literature was coming more and more to centre in London, and London was already growing oppressive. Certainly, from any part of it, you could still reach the fields in a ten-minutes' walk; the frog-bit, as Gerarde tells us, was yet to be found in the pools and ditches of Southwark. Nevertheless, the life

of the day was essentially one lived among men, and not among trees. And further, the old order of things, in which each found from birth some natural place and definite sphere of duties marked out for him, had disappeared; the struggle for existence, though the term would not have been understood, was becoming exacting; a man must push and bustle and intrigue and trample upon his fellows, to make his own way. Life was strenuous and difficult, and though it had its ardours and extreme joys, it had its moments of weariness and reaction also. The finer spirits of the day were clearly touched to this issue; Raleigh yearning for his "scallop shell of quiet"; Spenser going home with a sigh of relief to the "green alders by the Mulla's shore", or Donne to the "salads and onions of Mitcham". And it was to this mood that pastoral had its pleasant meaning. For one must realize that pastoral is not the poetry of country life, but the poetry of the townsman's dream of country life. Upon the semblance of such a dream is Arcadia fashioned; a land of rustling leaves and cool waters, of simple pleasures and honest loves; a land where men "fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world", untroubled so long as their flocks bear well, and their mistresses are kind, content with rude lodging and humble fare, and without envy for the luxuries and vexations of the great. Three spiritual notes characterize the pastoral. One is this exaltation of content, connecting itself on the one side with the longing for renewed simplicity of manners, on the other with a vivid sense of the uncertainty of all human