After Spenser, Drayton is the first pastoral poet who deserves mention. His Idea: The Shepherd's Garland bears the date 1593, but was probably written rather earlier. In 1595 he produced Endimion and Phoebe, and then turned his fluent pen to the other branches of poetic literature ; but after more than 3o years, at the very close of his life, he turned to this early love, and pub lished in 1627 two pastorals, The Quest of Cynthia and The Shep herd's Sirena. The general character of all these pieces, as of the Queen's Arcadia of Daniel, is rich, but vague and unimpassioned. Marlowe's pastoral lyric "Come live with Me," although not printed until 1599, has been attributed to 1589. Barnfield's singu lar production The Affectionate Shepherd was printed in 1594• With the close of the 16th century pastoral literature was not extinguished in England as suddenly or as completely as it was in Italy and Spain. Throughout the romantic Jacobean age the English love of country life asserted itself under the guise of pastoral sentiment, and the influence of Tasso and Guarini was felt in England just when it had ceased to be active in Italy. In i6o6 Day dramatized part of Sidney's Arcadia in his Isle of Gulls, and about 1625 Thomas Goffe composed his Careless Shepherdess, which Ben Jonson designed to imitate in the opening of his Sad Shepherd. In 1610 Fletcher produced his Faithful Shepherdess in emulation of the Aminta of Tasso. This is the principal pastoral play in the language, and in the Sad Shepherd, which was perhaps written about 1635, and in his pastoral masques, we see Ben Jonson following along the track that Fletcher had pointed out. The last pastoral drama in the 17th century was Settle's Pastor Fido (1677).
Still more characteristic are the lyrical eclogues, usually in short measure, a class of poetry peculiar to the nation and to that age. The lighter staves of The Shepherd's Calendar were the model from which all these graceful productions were drawn. Nicholas Breton came first with his Passionate Shepherd in Wither followed with The Shepherd's Hunting in 1615, and Braith waite, an inferior writer, published The Poet's Willow in 1613 and Shepherd's Tales in 1621. Wither's friend William Browne pub lished in 1613-16 his beautiful collection of Devonshire idylls called Britannia's Pastorals. These were in heroic verse and less distinctly Spenserian in character than those eclogues recently mentioned. In 1614 Browne, Wither, Christopher Brook and Davies of Hereford united in the composition of a little volume of pastorals entitled The Shepherd's Pipe. The masterpieces of this native school are L'Allegro and II Penseroso, as Lycidas is the masterpiece of the Virgilian manner.
This sub-Spenserian poetry led in another generation to a rich growth of lyrics which may be roughly called pastoral, but are not strictly bucolic. Carew, Lovelace, Suckling, Stanley and Cart wright are lyrists who all contributed to this harvest of country song, but by far the most copious and the most characteristic of the pastoral lyrists is Herrick. He has, perhaps, no rival in mod
ern literature in this particular direction. His originality and ob servation, his interest in recording homely facts of country life, combine with his extraordinary gift of song to place him in the very first rank among pastoral writers; in Herrick's hands the pastoral becomes real and modern. From him we date the recog nition in poetry of the humble beauty that lies about our doors.
Pastoral came into fashion again early in the i8th century. The quarrel between Philips and Pope gives 1708 a considerable importance in the annals of bucolic writing. Pope had written his idylls first, and it was a source of infinite annoyance to him that Philips contrived to precede him in publication. He succeeded in throwing ridicule on Philips, however, and his own pastorals were greatly admired. Yet there was some nature in Philips, and, though Pope is more elegant, he is not one whit more bucolic. A far better writer of pastoral than either is Gay, whose Shepherd's Week was a serious attempt to break with the Arcadian tradition and to copy Theocritus in his simplicity. Swift proposed to Gay that he should write a Newgate pastoral in which the swains and nymphs should talk and warble in slang. This Gay never did attempt ; but a northern admirer of his and Pope's achieved a veritable and lasting success in Lowland Scotch, a dialect then considered no less beneath the dignity of verse. Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd ([725) was the last, and remains the most verte brate and interesting, bucolic drama produced in Great Britain. It remained a favourite, 15o years after, among Lowland reapers and milkmaids. With the Gentle Shepherd and Johnson's denun ciation of the whole pastoral convention (including Lycidas) the chronicle of pastoral in England practically closes.
The taste of the i8th century was very agreeably tickled by the religious idylls of Salomon Gessner, who died in 1787. His Daph nis and Phillis and Der Tod Abels were read and imitated through out Europe. Jean Pierre Clovis de Florian, who began by imitat ing the Galatea of Cervantes, continued with an original bucolic romance entitled Estelle. But pastoral is a form of literature which disappears before a breath of ridicule. Neither Gessner nor his follower Abbt were able to survive the laughter of Herder. Since Florian and Gessner there has been no reappearance of bucolic literature properly so-called. Throughout Europe the Ro mantic interest in nature and the humanitarian interest in the poor combined in the 19th century to produce a new form, the rustic stories of Auerbach, of George Sand and of Hardy, which are the modern equivalent of the pastoral, stripped of Arcadian convention and merging in the larger genera of realist or romantic fiction.