Son cuer ne doit estre de glace,
    Bien que elle ait de Neige le sein.

Thus Lodge added to the original story the figures of the usurper, Rosalynde, Alinda (Celia), and the shepherds Montanus (Silvius), Coridon (Corin) and Phoebe, while to Shakespeare we owe Amiens, Jacques, Touchstone, Audre, and a few minor characters; whence it appears that Lodge’s contribution forms the mainstay of the plot as familiar to modern readers.  Moreover, in spite of the stiltedness of the style where the author yet remembers to be euphuistic, in spite of the long ‘orations,’ ‘passions,’ ‘meditations’ and the like, each carefully labelled and giving to the whole the air of a series of rhetorical exercises, in spite of the mediocre quality of most of the verses, if we except its one perfect gem, the romance yet retains not a little of its silvan and idyllic sweetness.

Before leaving the school of Lyly, which included a number of more or less famous writers, I may take the opportunity of mentioning two authors usually reckoned among them.  One, John Dickenson, left two works of a pastoral nature.  His short romance entitled Arisbas appeared in 1594, and may have supplied Daniel with a hint for the kidnapping of Silvia in Hymen’s Triumph.  Another yet shorter work, entitled the Shepherd’s Complaint, which is undated, but was probably printed in the same year, is remarkable for being composed more than half in verse, largely hexameters.  In it the author falls asleep and is transported in his dreams to Arcady, where he listens to the lament of a shepherd for the love of Amaryllis.  The cruel nymph is, however, soon punished, for, challenging Diana in beauty, she falls a victim to the shafts of the angry goddess, and is buried with full bucolic honours, whereupon the author awakes.  The other writer is William Warner, well known from his Albion’s England, published in 1586, who left a work entitled Pan his Syrinx, which appeared in 1584; but in this pastoralism does not penetrate beyond the title-page.

Of the books which everybody knows and nobody reads, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia is perhaps the most famous[142].  Yet though an account of the romance may be found in the pages of every literary textbook, the history of how the work came to be printed has never been fully cleared up[143].  The Arcadia, as it remained at Sidney’s death, was fragmentary.  Two books and a portion of a third were all that had undergone revision, and possibly represented the portion which Sidney compiled while living with his sister at Wilton, after his retirement from court in 1581—­the portion for the most part actually written in his sister’s presence.  Even of this trustworthy manuscripts were rare, most of those that circulated being copies of the unrevised text.  Sidney died on October 17, 1586, and even before the end of the year we find his friend Fulke Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke, writing to Sidney’s father-in-law,