The pastoral tradition, such as it was, that thus formed itself on the English stage remained to the end hesitating, tentative, and undefined.  At no time did it become an enveloping atmosphere of artistic creation.  Authors approached it as it were from the outside, from no sense of inner compulsion, but experimentally from the broader standpoint of the romantic drama, and with the air of pioneers and innovators, as if ignorant of what had been already achieved in the same line by their predecessors.  Consequently, in spite of the considerable following it enjoyed, this romantic-pastoral tradition lacked vitality, and failed as a rule to attract authors of more pre-eminent powers.  We have already seen how the three chief English experiments stand apart from it, and we shall find as we proceed that there are other plays as well which it is difficult to bring strictly into line, though they are not in themselves of sufficient importance to claim separate consideration.  In some measure, indeed, it may be truly said that, like the history of the Senecan drama or of classical versification, the history of the dramatic pastoral in England is that of a long series of incoherent and more or less fruitless experiments.  There is, however, an important difference between the two cases, for in the pastoral we are at least aware of a striving towards some new and but dimly apprehended form of artistic expression.  It is true that this was never attained; and looking back from the vantage-ground of time we may doubt whether after all it was worth attaining, but it serves to differentiate the pastoral experiment from those others whose object was but the revival of a past for ever vanished.  The English pastoral drama had one advantage at least over many other literary fopperies, in that it obeyed the fundamental law of literary progress, which is one with artistic evolution.

A chronological survey of the regular plays to be classed as pastorals will best serve the needs of our present inquiry, and for this purpose it is fortunate that in nearly all cases we possess evidence which enables us to date the work with tolerable accuracy, while the few which yet remain doubtful are themselves unimportant, and probably fall near the limit of our period.  Even, however, were this not so, the singular independence of most of the pieces and the absence of any visible line of development would make uncertainty as to their order of far less consequence here than in many departments of literary history in which similar evidence is unhappily wanting.

In substance, then, the romantic pastoral in England was a combination of the Arcadian drama of Italy with the chivalric romance of Spain, as familiarized through the medium of Sidney’s work, and also, though less consistently, with the never very fully developed tradition of the mythological play.  In form, again, it may be said to represent the mingling of the conventions of the Italian drama with the freer