ercised on
both.[142] Sidney, however full of it elsewhere, put less of it in his
actual novel; while, on the other hand, nothing did so much to create
and spread the rather rococo notion of pseudo-platonic love in France,
and from France throughout Europe, as the _Astree_ itself. The further
union of the philosophic mind with an eminently cavalier
temperament--the united _ethos_ of scholar, soldier, lover, and
courtier--fills out the comparison: and dwarfs such merely mechanical
things as the mixed use of prose and verse (which both may have taken,
nay pretty certainly did take, from Montemayor) and the pastoralities,
for which they in the same way owed royalty to the Spaniard, to Tasso,
to Sannazar, and to the Greek romances, let alone Theocritus and Virgil.
And, to confine ourselves henceforward to our own special subject, it is
this double infusion of idealism--of spiritual and intellectual
enthusiasm on the one hand and practical fire of life and act on the
other--which makes the great difference, not merely between the _Astree_
and its predecessors of the _Amadis_ class, but between it and its
successors the strictly "Heroic" romances, though these owe it so much.
The first--except in some points of passion--hardly touch reality at
all; the last are perpetually endeavouring to simulate and insinuate a
sort of reality under cover of adventures and conventions which, though
fictitious, are hardly at all fantastic. But the _Astree_ might almost
be called a French prose _Faerie Queene_, allowing for the difference of
the two nations, languages, vehicles, and _milieux_ generally, in its
representation of the above-mentioned cavalier-philosophic _ethos_--a
thing never so well realised in France as in England or in Spain, but of
which Honore d'Urfe, from many traits in life and book, seems to have
been a real example, and which certainly vindicates its place in history
and literature.

[Sidenote: Its appearance and its author's other work.]

The _Astree_ appeared in five instalments, 1607-10-12-19 and
posthumously, the several parts being frequently printed: and it is said
to be almost impossible to find a copy, all the parts of which are of
the first issue in each case. The two later parts probably, the last
certainly, were collaborated in, if not wholly written by, the author's
secretary Baro. But it was by no means Honore's only work; indeed the
Urfes up to his time were an unusually literary family; and, while his