This last dayes danger having made Pamela’s loue discerne what a losse it should haue suffered if Dorus had beene destroyed, bred such tendernesse of kindnesse in her toward him, that she could no longer keepe loue from looking out through her eyes, and going forth in her words; whom before as a close prisoner, shee had to her heart onely committed:  so as finding not onely by his speeches and letters, but by the pitifull oration of a languishing behaviour, and the easily deciphered character of a sorrowfull face, that despaire began now to threaten him destruction, she grew content both to pitie him, and let him see shee pitied him. * * * by making her owne beautifull beames to thaw away the former ycinesse of her behaviour.[78]

That portion of the “Arcadia” which relates to pastoral life owes its origin to Spanish and Portuguese works.  But there were not wanting to Sidney’s experience actual examples of that peaceful existence to which, in troubled times, men have so often turned as a pleasing contrast to their own cares, and dangers.  The shepherds of the Sussex Downs, pursuing through centuries their simple vocation, unheeded by the world, untouched by revolution or civil war, tended their sheep with little thought or knowledge of the world beyond the downs, and presented to the poet a picture of calm content, in pleasing contrast to the active or terrible incidents which more frequently made up the sum both of romance and of actual life.  The shepherds of the “Arcadia” make even less pretence to reality than the martial heroes.  They are usually poets and musicians; speaking in courtly phrases, and occupied with amorous adventures, they serve sometimes to relieve, and sometimes to heighten, the more stirring scenes.

A third element in the “Arcadia” is the comic, and with this, as might be expected from the rather crude ideas of humor prevalent in the sixteenth century, Sidney met with indifferent success.  The wit depends on the ugliness, the perversity, and the clownish character of Dametas, his wife, and their daughter Mopsa.  It partakes of the nature of the practical joke, and though it no doubt amused the courtiers of Elizabeth, is too clumsy for a more cultivated taste.  But although Sidney’s comic scenes may no longer amuse, it must be said that they are free from the low coarseness and ribaldry which have furnished merriment to times which pretended to a much higher standard of wit and education than his own.  An interesting contrast may be made between a comic passage of the “Arcadia,"[79] representing a fight between two cowards, and perhaps the only scene in the “Morte d’Arthur” of humorous intent,[80]—­that in which King Mark is ignominiously put to flight by Arthur’s court fool disguised in the armor of a knight.