rse should be used without mercy to readers or to the historian
himself in this first chapter. For there is hardly any department of
literature which has been more left to the rather treacherous care of
traditional and second- or seventh-hand judgment than the Heroic
romance.[127]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The Pastoral in general.]

The Pastoral, as being of the most ancient and in a literary sense of
the highest formal rank, may occupy us first, but by no means longest. A
great deal of attention (perhaps a great deal more than was at all
necessary) has been paid to the pastoral element in various kinds of
literature. The thing is certainly curious, and inevitably invited
comment; but unfortunately it has peculiar temptations to a kind of
comment which, though very fashionable for some time past, is rarely
profitable. Pastorals of the most interesting kind actually exist in
literature: "pastoralism" in the abstract, unless treated in the pure
historical manner, is apt, like all similar criticism and discussion of
"kinds" in general, to tend to [Greek: phlyaria].[128] For a history in
a nutshell there is perhaps room even here, because the relations of the
thing to fiction cannot be well understood without it. That the
association of shepherds,[129] with songs, and with the telling of
"tales" in both senses, is immensely old, is a fact which the Hebrew
Scriptures establish, and almost the earliest Greek mythology and poetry
confirm; but the wiser mind, here as elsewhere, will probably be content
with the fact, and not enquire too busybodily into the reason. The
connection between Sicily--apparently a land of actual pastoral
life--and Alexandria--the home of the first professional man-of-letters
school, as it may be called--perhaps supplies something more; the actual
beauty of the Sicilian-Alexandrian poems, more still; the adoption of
the form by Virgil, who was revered at Rome, renowned somewhat
heterodoxically in the Middle Ages, and simply adored by the
Renaissance, most of all. So, in English, Spenser and Milton, in French,
Marot and others niched it solidly in the nation's poetry; and the
certainly charming _Daphnis and Chloe_, when vernacularised, transferred
its influence from verse to prose in almost all the countries of Europe.

To what may be called "common-sense" criticism, there is, of course, no
form of literature, in either prose or verse, which is more utterly
abhorrent and