PASTORAL POETRY is that kind of poetry which professes to delineate the scenery, sentiment, and incidents of shepherd life. It is highly probable that the first attempts to give a rhythmic expression to human feeling were to some extent of this character. Men were originally shepherds. and their festal songs and hymns would derive at least substance and imagery from their primitive occupations; but as a distinct branch of poetic art, pastoral poetry was not cultivated till a comparatively late period; for although critics are fond of pointing to the lives of the Hebrew patriarchs, and to the story of Ruth, as specimens of the antiquity of the pastoral in the east, yet, as these profess to be history, and not fiction, they can be instanced only to prove that the material for this kind of poetry existed from the earliest ages. In point of fact, it was only after innocence and simplicity had passed away, or were thought to have passed away, from real life, that men began, half from fancy, and half from memory, to paint the manners of the past as artless, and the lives of their ancestors as constantly happy. It was thus the brass age that made the golden. The oldest specimens of the classic pastoral are the Idylls of Theoeritus (q.v.), which appeared about 275 n.e.—long after Greece had produced her masterpieces in epic narrative, in the war ode, and almost all other kinds of the lyric, in tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy, and rhetoric. Theoeritus was imitated by Dion and Moschus, whose pastorals approximate in form to the drama. Among the Latins, the refilled and courtly Virgil, in the reign of Augustus, wrote his Bocoliea or Erlaques, on the model of his Greek predecessors; but, however beautiful and melodious the verses of these urban writers are, we cannot suppose for a moment that the rude shepherds and shepherdesses of Italy or Sicily indulged in such refined sentiments, or spent their time so poetically as there they are made to do. Virgil, we may rest assured, is as far from giving a genuine picture of pastoral life in his verse as any modern poet who prates of Chloe and Phyllis.
During the middle ages, pastoral poetry in this artistic, and therefore conventional, sense of the term, was almost unknown; but with the first glimpse of reviving classicism, the pastoral reappears. The earliest specimens are afforded by Boccaccio (q.v.). about the first modern Italian who studied Greek. It is to the countrymen of Boccaccio that we owe the creation of the pastoral drama, of which there is no trace in ancient litera ture. The Fa rota di Orfeo of Politian (q.v.), performed at the court of Mantua in 1483, is the first dramatic poem which pretends to represent the sentiments, incidents, and forms of pastoral life. Critics have forgotten this work when they make Tansillo the
inventor of the favola pastorale, or boseareccia, on account of his I due Pellegri»i (15:9). or Agostino Beccari, whose pastoral comedy, II Saerifizio, was played at Ferrara in 1554. However, it is true that the extraordinary popularity of Beecari's piece originated a crowd offarole boseareceie, the finest and most poetical of which is the Amninta of TaSso, repre sented at the court of Ferrara in 1572. A later. but hardly less famous production is tbo Pastor Rdo of Guarini (q.v.), published at Venice in 1590; and in the 18th c. the poet Metastasio (q.v.) revived for a moment the interest in this graceful and picturesque, but unreal branch of literature. In Spain, during the first part. of the 10th c., it abundantly flourished. The first who wrote pastoral dialogues was Juan del Elcina (dr. 1500); he was followed by Garcilaso de In Vega, and others. During the reign of the emperor Charles V., one may say that Spanish imaginative literature was almost wholly of a bucolic character; but in Spain, as elsewhere, it took largely the form of prose-romance (see NovELs) rather than of poetry, deriving its inspiration from the Daphnis and Chloe of Longus, the Byzantine romancist, not from the tuneful strains of the Mantuan swan. England, however, can boast of Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, is at least full of charming poetry, and is appropriately dedicated to sir Philip Sidney, whose pastoral romance of ilreadia outstrips in point of literary beauty all other fictions of that class. The Germans reckon Shakespeare's As You Like It in the list of pastoral dramas; but its right to be so classified is by no clear, although we may admit that it betrays the influence of the pastoral poetry and romance that had just ceased to be the Tage among the scholarly geniuses of Europe. A similar influence is visible in the writings of other rlizabethon dramatists, as, for example, in the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher. In France, pastoral poetry is perhaps older than in any of the western nations. The comedy of Adam de LeliaIle, surnamed be Bossu d'Arras (The Hunchback of Arms), entitled Le Jett de Robia et Marion (and which exists in MS, in the Bibliotheque Imperiale), belongs to the middle of the 13th century. During the civil wars in the latter half of the 16th c. the rastoral was turned to political uses. In the following century, it continued for some time to be popular• or rather, let us say, fashionable. Even the great Richelieu alleviated tlie cares of office with the composition of La Grande Pastorale; but here, too, the poem soon gave way to the prose-romance, which.was hardly less unreal, and fat more exciting.