jurists and administrators, poets and scholars, set about the refining of
language and literature decked out in all the fopperies of the fashionable
craze. One is tempted to wonder whether anything more serious than light
loves and fantastic amours can have flourished amid eighteenth-century
pastoralism. When the ladies of the court began to talk dairy-farming with
the scholars and statesmen of the day, the pretence of pastoral simplicity
could hardly be long kept up. Nor was there any attempt to do so. In the
introduction to his famous romance d'Urfé wrote in answer to objectors:
'Responds leur, ma Bergere, que pour peu qu'ils ayent connoissance de toy,
ils sçauront que tu n'es pas, ny celles aussi qui te suivent, de ces
Bergeres necessiteuses, qui pour gaigner leur vie conduisent les troupeaux
aux pasturages; mais que vous n'avez toutes pris cette condition que pour
vivre plus doucement et sans contrainte.' No wonder that to Fontenelle
Theocritus' shepherds 'sentent trop la campagne[4].' But the hour of
pastoralism had come, and while the ladies and gallants of the court were
playing the parts of Watteau swains and shepherdesses amid the trim hedges
and smooth lawns of Versailles, the gates were already bursting before the
flood, which was to sweep in devastation over the land, and to purge the
old order of social life.



II


The Alexandria of the Ptolemies was not the nurse of a great literature,
though the age was undoubtedly one of considerable literary activity.
Scholastic learning and poetic imitation were rife; the rehandling of
Greek masterpieces was a fashionable pastime. For serious and original
composition, however, the conditions were not favourable. That the age