Italian translation followed in the seventeenth century,[12] and a Spanish
is also extant. There is no doubt that it was widely read throughout the
sixteenth and following centuries, but it exercised little influence on
the development of pastoral literature. By the time it became generally
known the main features of renaissance pastoral were already fixed, and in
motive and treatment alike it was alien to the spirit that animated the
fashionable masterpieces. The modern pastoral romance had already evolved
itself from a blending of the eclogue with the mythological tale. The
drama was developing on independent lines. Thus although, like the other
romances of the late Greek school, it supplied many incidents and
descriptions to be found in later works, it played no vital part in the
history of pastoral, and left no mark either on the general form or on the
spirit that animated the kind. Longus' romance finds its true descendant,
as well as its closest imitation, in a work that achieved celebrity on the
eve of the French revolution, that masterpiece of unreal and sentimental
simplicity, Saint-Pierre's _Paul et Virginie_.



III


A faithful reproduction of the main conditions of actual life was the
characteristic of Theocritus' poetry. It was subject to this ever-present
limitation that his graceful fancy exercised its power of idealization. He
took the singing match, the dirge, and the love-song or complaint as he
found them among the shepherd-folk of Sicily, and gave them that objective
setting which is as necessary to pastoral as to every other merely
accidental form of poetry; for the true subjective lyric is independent of
circumstances. The first of his great successors made the bucolic eclogue