Robert Tofte is credited with having translated in his Honour’s Academy,’ or the Famous Pastoral of the Fair Shepherdess Julietta,’ which appeared at London in 1610.  Tofte’s work, however, while purporting to be ‘done into English,’ makes no mention of the original author, and though indebted for its form and title to Nicholas’ romance does not appear to bear much further resemblance to it.  A far more important work in itself, but one which does not much concern us here, is Honore d’Urfe’s Astree, an autobiographic compilation in which the fashionable pastoral romance found its most consummate example.  The work was translated into English as early as 1620, but the history of its influence in this country belongs almost exclusively to the French vogue, which began about the middle of the century, and formed such an important element in the literature of the restoration.

The comparatively small influence exerted by the French pastoral of the renaissance on that of England must excuse the scanty summary given in the preceding paragraphs.  It remains to be said that there had existed at an earlier period in France another and very different tradition, which supplied one of the regular forms of composition in vogue among trouveres and troubadours alike.  The pastourelle has sometimes been described as a popular form, but it would be difficult to determine wherein its ‘popularity,’ in the sense intended, consists, for it is easily recognized as the offspring of a knightly minstrelsy, and indeed is scarcely less artificial or conventional than the Italian eclogue.  Although the situation is frequently developed with resource and invention on the part of the individual poet, the general type is rigidly fixed.  The narrator, who is a minstrel and usually a knight, while riding along meets a shepherd-girl, to whom he pays his court with varying success.  This is the simple framework on which the majority are composed.  A few, on the other hand, depart from the type and depict purely rustic scenes.  Others—­and the fact is at least significant—­serve to convey allusions, political, personal or didactic:  a variety found as early as the twelfth century in Provencal, and about the fourteenth in northern French.  Wandering scholars adopted the form from the knightly singers and produced a plentiful crop of Latin pastoralia, usually of a somewhat burlesque nature.  An idea of the general style of these may be gathered from such lines as the following, which contain the reply of a country girl hesitating before the advances of a merry student: 

Si senserit meus pater uel Martinus maior frater, erit mihi dies ater; uel si sciret mea mater, cum sit angue peior quater:  uirgis sum tributa.[70]

Appropriated, lastly, and refashioned by the hand of an original genius, the pastourelle gave to German poetry the crowning jewel of its Minnesang in Walther’s ‘Under der linden,’ with its irrepressibly roguish refrain: