this country exercised any wide influence over the regular drama, there can be no question such an influence was exercised to a very appreciable degree by pastoral poetry in general.  I am not thinking of the romances at this moment, for as we have already seen it was the non-pastoral elements in the pastoral novel that exerted such influence as can be traced over the drama, but rather of the pastoral ideal and the pastoral mode in general, as expressed either in the lyric, the eclogue, or the drama.  In this the drama shared an influence which was also exercised on other departments of literature.  Numerous songs might be quoted from the scenes of the Elizabethan dramatists in support of this contention; while, on the other hand, we also find dramatic and descriptive passages the idyllic quality of which may not unreasonably be referred to a pastoral source.

This tendency of the drama to absorb pastoral elements rather from the lyric and the idyll than from regular plays in that kind is significant.  It is the acknowledgement of an important fact, which pastoralism failed to recognize; namely, that as the expression of the pastoral idea gained in complexity of artistic structure it lost in vitality.  The pastoral drama, born late in time, was the outcome of very especial circumstances, emphatically the child of its age, and little calculated to serve the artistic requirements of any other.  Once the creative impulse that gave it life was withdrawn the falsity of the kind as a form of art became manifest; and though it lingered on for many years its life was but that of a fashionable toy, with little or no hold over the vital literature of its day.  The popularity of the pastoral eclogue or idyll was of far longer duration.  Though the form was more or less definitely conditioned, it had less of the structural rigidity of the drama, it brought its subject less into contact with the hard limitations of reality, and, which may also have been important, brought it less into comparison with other subject-matter employing the same or a closely analogous form.  Thus it was better able to adapt itself to the tastes and requirements of various ages, and found favour in such vastly different societies as those for which Theocritus, Mantuan, Spenser, and Pope produced their works in this kind.  Even here, however, the simple sensuous ideal was too much hampered by the ungenuine paraphernalia which the conventions of these various societies had gathered round it to take rank among the permanent and inevitable forms of literary art.  This was granted to the lyric alone.  It was through the lyric that the pastoral ideal and pastoral colouring most deeply penetrated and influenced existing forms; for the lyric, the freest and most unconditioned of all poetical kinds, the least tied to the circumstances and limitations of the actual world, was particularly fitted to extract the fragrance from the pastoral ideal without raising any unseasonable questions as to its rational or actual possibility.