The Charm of the Book. In spite of the conventionality inseparable from the pastoral form, and the obvious artificiality of the style in which it is written, “Rosalynde” is really charming.  Its charm is much like that of Watteau’s landscapes.  Like them, it is an idyll in court dress, a fete elegante, a kind of elegant picnic.  Yet, like Watteau’s pictures it is of more than merely historic interest, for it is far more than simply a reminder of the fopperies of a vanished time.  There is in it, as in the paintings, a lightness and daintiness of coloring, and an indescribable air of freshness that have made the romance appeal to poets as the work of Watteau has appealed to painters.  Shakespeare felt its charm so much that he made it the basis of the plot of “As You Like It.”  That it became one of his “sources” has injured it incalculably in the popular estimation.  It has become a commonplace of criticism to declare that “Rosalynde’s” chief title to be remembered is its having furnished a hint to Shakespeare.  As a matter of fact, however, it had, to use Johnson’s phrase, “enough wit to keep it sweet,” even without Shakespeare’s play “to preserve it from putrefaction.”  Lodge really had a pretty story to tell, and he tells it, if not with gusto, at least with grace and with some degree of skill.  Exquisitely graceful are some of the narrative passages, where the very words seem to possess a clear and pellucid quality like the water of the spring that Rosalynde and Aliena found in Arden, “so crystalline and clear, that it seemed Diana and her Dryades and Hamadryades had that spring, as the secret of all their bathings."[1] Such, for instance, is the account of the night and morning succeeding the first meeting of Rosalynde and Rosader in the Forest of Arden.[2] Graceful, too, are the descriptions of the landscapes in Arden, such as that of the “fair valley” where Rosalynde and Aliena found Montanus and Corydon “seeing their sheep feed, playing on their pipes many pleasant tunes, and from music and melody falling into much amorous chat.”  So charmingly graceful are these descriptions that, together with Shakespeare, Lodge has made the Forest of Arden almost as much the accepted home of the pastoral as Sicily and Arcadia[3] had been hitherto.

[Footnote 1:  P. 31.]

[Footnote 2:  Pp. 58 and 60.]

[Footnote 3:  Theocritus (283-263 B.C.) localized his “Idyls” in Sicily; Vergil (70-19 B.C.), his “Eclogues” in Arcadia.]

Lodge’s Skill as a Story-teller. To say that Lodge is a skillful as well as a graceful story-teller is, of course, to make an indefensible assertion.  In the sixteenth century English fiction was still in its infancy, and English prose was still undeveloped.  Yet we do find in Lodge certain qualities of style that show clearly an advance over the formlessness of some of the stories that had preceded.  Though the sentence and paragraph structure is loose and amorphous, the transitions from one subject to another