Given the widespread popularity of the work, the influence exercised by the story on English letters is hardly a matter for wonder.  Of its general influence on the drama it will be my business to speak later; at present we may note that while yet in manuscript it probably supplied Lodge with certain hints for his Rosalynde, and so indirectly influenced As You Like It.  One of the best-known episodes, again, that of Argalus and Parthenia, was versified by Quarles in 1632, and, adorned with a series of cuts, went through a large number of editions before the end of the century, besides being dramatized by Glapthorne.  The incident of Pyrocles heading the Zelots has been thought to have suggested the scene in the Two Gentlemen of Verona in which Valentine consents to lead the robber band, while to Sidney Shakespeare was likewise indebted, not only for the cowards’ fight in Twelfth Night, but in the ’story of the Paphlagonian unkinde king,’ for the original of the Gloster episode in King Lear.  A certain prayer out of the later portion of the romance was, as is well known, a favourite with Charles I in the days of his misfortune, but the controversial use made of the fact by Milton it is happily possible to pass over in silence.

Finally, it is worth mentioning as illustrating the vogue of Sidney’s romance, that it not only had the very singular honour of being translated into French in the first half of the seventeenth century, but that two translations actually appeared, the rivalry between which gave rise to a literary controversy of some asperity[150].

Thus we take leave of the pastoral novel or romance, a kind which never attained to the weighty tradition of the eclogue, or the grace of the lyric, nor was subjected to the rigorous artistic form of the drama[151].  It remained throughout nerveless and diffuse, and, in spite of much incidental beauty, was habitually wanting in interest, except in so far as it renounced its pastoral nature.  As Professor Raleigh has put it:  ’To devise a set of artificial conditions that shall leave the author to work out the sentimental inter-relations of his characters undisturbed by the intrusion of probability or accident is the problem; love in vacuo is the beginning and end of the pastoral romance proper.’  A similar attempt is noticeable in the drama, but the conditions soon came to be recognized as impossible for artistic use.  The operation of human affection under utterly imaginary and impossible conditions is not a matter of human interest; the resuit was a purely fictitious amatory code, as absurd as it was unhealthy, and, when sustained by no extrinsic interest of allegory or the like, the kind soon disappeared.  As it is, in the pastoral novel, it is only when the enchanted circle is broken by the rough and tumble of vulgar earthly existence that on the featureless surface of the waters something of the light and shade of true romance replaces the steady pitiless glare ot a philosophical or sentimental ideal.