Kuster mich? wol tusentstunt: 
    tandaradei,
    seht wie rot mir ist der munt!

Connected with the pastourelles of the langue d’oil is an isolated dramatic effort, of a primitive and naive sort, but of singular grace and charm. Li jus Robins et Marion, the work of Adan le Bochu or de le Hale, is in fact a dramatized pastourelle of some eight hundred lines beginning with the rejection by a shepherdess of the advances of a knight and ending with the rustic sports of the shepherds on the green.  Unsophisticated nature and playful cunning unite in no ordinary degree to lend delicacy and savour to the work, while the literary quality of Adan’s verse is evident in such incidental songs as Marion’s often quoted: 

    Robins m’aime, Robins m’a,
    Robins m’a demandee, si m’ara.

In spite, however, of the genuine naivete and natural realism of the piece, it is easy to recognize in it something of the same spirit of gentle raillery that sparkles in the graceful octaves of Lorenzo’s Nencia.

A real and lively love of the country, rather than any idealization of the actual shepherd class, is reflected in a poem written about 1460 by Rene of Anjou, ex-king of Naples, describing in pastoral guise the rustic retreat which he enjoyed in company with his wife, Jeanne de Laval, on the banks of the Durance.  The conventional pastoralism that veils the identity of the shepherd and shepherdess is scarcely more than a pretence, for at the end of the manuscript we find blazoned the arms of the royal pair, with the inscription: 

    Icy sont les armes, dessoubz ceste couronne,
    Du bergier dessus dit et de la bergeronne.

We have now completed the first section of our introductory survey of pastoral literature.  We have passed in review, in a necessarily rapid and superficial, but, it is to be hoped, not altogether inadequate, manner, the varions manifestations of the kind in the non-dramatic literature of continental Europe.  The Italian pastoral drama has been reserved for separate and more detailed consideration in close connexion with that of this country.  It must, however, be borne in mind that in such a survey as the present many of the byways and more or less obscure and devious channels by which pastoral permeated the wide fields of literature have of necessity been left unexplored.  Nothing, for instance, has been said about the pastoral interludes which occupy a not inconspicuous place in the martial cantos both of the Orlando and the Gerusalemme.  Before passing on, however, I should like to say a few words concerning one particular department of renaissance literature, and that chiefly by way of illustrating the limitations of the tradition of literary pastoral.  I refer to the novelle or nouvelles, in which, although pastoral subjects are occasionally introduced, the treatment is entirely independent of conventional tradition.  Without