decadent court or as the plaything of the leisure hours of a college of
learning, and its insipid convention having become 'a literary plague in
every European capital,' it finally disappeared from view amid the
fopperies of the Roman Arcadia and the puerile conceits of the Petit
Trianon.

Wherein then, it may be wondered, does the pastoral's title to
consideration lie. It does not lie primarily, or chiefly, in the fact that
it is associated with names of the first rank in literature, with
Theocritus and Vergil, with Petrarch, Politian, and Tasso, with Cervantes
and Lope de Vega, with Ronsard and Marot, with Spenser, Ben Jonson, and
Milton; nor yet that works such as the _Idyls_, the _Aminta_, the
_Faithful Shepherdess_, and _Lycidas_ contain some of the most graceful
and perfect verse to be found in any language. Rather is its importance to
be sought in the fact that the form is the expression of instincts and
impulses deep-rooted in the nature of humanity, which, while affecting the
whole course of literature, at times evince themselves most clearly and
articulately here; that it plays a distinct and distinctive part in the
history of human thought and the history of artistic expression. Moreover,
it may be argued that, from this point of view, the very contradictions
and inconsistencies to which I have alluded make it all the more important
to discover wherein lay the strange vitality of the form and its power of
influencing the current of European letters.

From what has already been said it will be apparent that little would be
gained by attempting beforehand to give any strict account of what is
meant by 'pastoral' in literature. Any definition sufficiently elastic to
include the protean forms assumed by what we call the 'pastoral ideal'
could hardly have sufficient intension to be of any real value. If after
considering a number of literary phenomena which appear to be related