'literature has constantly the double tendency to negative the life
around it, as well as to reproduce it.' Having inspired Ovid and Vergil,
and been recognized by Lucretius, it passed as a literary legacy to
Boethius, Dante, and Jean de Meung; it was incorporated by Frezzi in his
strange allegorical composition the _Quadriregio_, and was thrice handled
by Chaucer; it was dealt with humorously by Cervantes in _Don Quixote_,
and became the prey of the satirist in the hands of Juvenal, Bertini, and
Hall. The association of this ideal world with the simplicity of pastoral
life was effected by Vergil, and in this form it was treated with loving
minuteness by Tasso in his _Aminta_ and by Browne in his _Britannia's
Pastorals_[2]. The fiction no doubt answered to some need in human nature,
but in literature it soon came to be no more than a polite convention.

The conception of a golden age of rustic simplicity does not, indeed,
involve the whole of pastoral literature. It does not account either for
the allegorical pastoral, in which actual personages are introduced, in
the guise of shepherds, to discuss contemporary affairs, or for the
so-called realistic pastoral, in which the town looks on with amused envy
at the rustic freedom of the country. What it does comprehend is that
outburst of pastoral song which sprang from the yearning of the tired soul
to escape, if it were but in imagination and for a moment, to a life of
simplicity and innocence from the bitter luxury of the court and the
menial bread of princes[3].

And this, the reaction against the world that is too much with us, is,
after all, the keynote of what is most intimately associated with the name
of pastoral in literature--the note that is struck with idyllic sweetness
in Theocritus, and, rising to its fullest pitch of lyrical intensity,
lends a poignant charm to the work of Tasso and Guarini. For everywhere
in these soft melodies of luscious beauty, even in the studied sketches of