degradation of his life had
failed to destroy.

Greene's "Arcadia" was published in 1587, and bears in its fanciful
title of "Camilla's Alarum to Slumber Euphues," the evidence of its
inspiration. Even among pastorals the improbability of this story is
surpassing. Damocles, king of Arcadia, banished his daughter with her
husband and son. Sephestia, the daughter, arrived in a part of Arcadia
entirely inhabited by shepherds. There she becomes a shepherdess under
the name of Samela, and meets her husband, Maximus, who is already
tending sheep in the same neighborhood with the name of Melicertus.
Strange to say, Sephestia fails to recognize her husband, and receives
his addresses as a favored lover. Soon after, Pleusidippus, Sephestia's
son, is stolen by pirates, and adopted by the king of Thessaly, in
whose court he grows up. The fame of Sephestia's beauty reaches her
father and her son, who, ignorant of the relationship in consequence of
Sephestia's change of name, both set out to woo the celebrated
shepherdess. The repulsive scene of the same woman being the object at
once of the passion of her father and her son is ended by Damocles
carrying off Sephestia to his own court, where he proposes to execute
Maximus as his successful rival, and Sephestia for her obstinate
refusal of his addresses. The Delphian oracle, however, interposes in
time by declaring the identity of Sephestia, and the story terminates
as usual in weddings and reconciliations.

The conventional shepherd's life is well described in the "Arcadia,"
and the pastoral tone is skilfully maintained. The language, however,
is confessedly euphuistic, as may be seen by the author's comment on a
speech of Samela:

Samela made this reply, because she had heard him so superfine, as
if Ephebus had learned him to refine his mother's tongue; wherefore
though he had done it of an ink horn desire to be eloquent, and
Melicertus thinking Samela had learned with Lucilla in Athens to
anatomize wit, and speak none but similes, imagined she smoothed
her talk to be thought like Sappho, Phaon's paramour.

The following passage could hardly be distinguished from the writings
of Lyly:

I had thought, Menaphon, that he which weareth the bay leaf had
been free from lightning, and the eagle's pen a preservative
against thunder; that labour had been enemy to love, and the
eschewing of idleness an antidote against fancy; but I see by
p