more helplessly exposed. Unsympathetic, and in some points
unfair and even unintelligent, as Johnson's criticism of _Lycidas_ may
seem, to the censure of its actual "pastorality" there is no answer,
except that "these things are an allegory" as well as a convention. To
go further out of mere common-sense objections, and yet stick to the
Devil's-Advocate line, there is no form which lends itself to--which,
indeed, insists upon--conventions of the most glaring unreality more
than the pastoral, and none in which the decorations, unless managed
with extraordinary genius, have such a tendency to be tawdry at best,
draggled and withered at worst. Nevertheless, the fact remains that at
almost all times, both in ancient literature and since the revival of
letters, as well as in some probably more spontaneous forms during the
Middle Ages themselves,[130] pastorals have been popular with the
vulgar, and practised by the elect; while within the very last hundred
years such a towering genius as Shelley's, and such a manifold and
effectual talent as Mr. Arnold's, have selected it for some of their
very best work.

Such adoption, moreover, had, for the writer of prose fiction, some
peculiar and pretty obvious inducements. It has been noticed by all
careful students of fiction that one of the initial difficulties in its
way, and one of those which do not seem to get out of that way very
quickly, is diffidence on the writer's part "how to begin." It may be
said that this is not peculiar to fiction; but extends from the poet who
never can get beyond the first lines of his epic to the journalist who
sits for an hour gazing at the blank paper for his article, and returns
home at midnight, if not like Miss Bolo "in a flood of tears and a sedan
chair," at any rate in a tornado of swearing at himself and (while there
were such things) a hansom cab. Pastoral gives both easy beginning and
supporting framework.

[Sidenote: Its beginnings in France.]

[Sidenote: Minor romances preceding the _Astree_.]

The transformation of the older pastoral form into the newer began,
doubtless, with the rendering into French of _Daphnis and Chloe_,[131]
which appeared in the same year with the complete _Heptameron_ (1559).
Twelve years later, in 1571, Belleforest's _La Pyrenee et Pastorale
Amoureuse_ rather took the title than exemplified the kind; but in 1578
the translation of Montemayor's _Diana_ definitely turned the current
into the new-old channel. I