estates in 1554, and to those of his uncle Clement in 1597. This William (1528–1610) was knighted in 1578. He was the founder of the Paston grammar-school at North Walsham, and made Oxnead Hall, near Norwich, his principal residence. Christopher Paston was Sir William’s son and heir, and Christopher’s grandson, William (d. 1663), was created a baronet in 1642; being succeeded in the title by his son Robert (1631–1683), who was a member of parliament from 1661 to 1673, and was created earl of Yarmouth in 1679. Robert’s son William (1652–1732), who married a natural daughter of Charles II., was the second earl, and, like his father, was in high favour with the Stuarts. When he died in 1732 he left no son, and his titles became extinct, his estates being sold to discharge his debts.
The perturbed state of affairs revealed by the Paston Letters reflects the general condition of England during the period. It was a time of trouble. The weakness of the government had disorganized every branch of the administration; the succession to the crown itself was contested; the great nobles lived in a state of civil war; and the prevailing discontent found expression in the rising of Jack Cade and in the Wars of the Roses. The correspondence reveals the Pastons in a great variety of relations to their neighbours, friendly or hostile; and abounds with illustrations of the course of public events, as well as of the manners and morals of the time. Nothing is more remarkable than the habitual acquaintance of educated persons, both men and women, with the law, which was evidently indispensable to persons of substance.
In addition to the editions of the Paston Letters already mentioned, see F. Blomefield and C. Parkin, History of Norfolk (London, 1805–1810), and the article in Dict. Nat. Biog. (A. W. H.*)
PASTORAL (from Lat. pastor, a shepherd), the name given to a certain class of modern literature in which the “idyll” of the
Greeks and the “eclogue” of the Latins are imitated. It was
a growth of humanism at the Renaissance, and its first home was
Italy. Virgil had been imitated, even in the middle ages, but
it was the example of Theocritus (q.v.) that was originally
followed in pastoral. Pastoral, as it appeared in Tuscany in
the 16th century, was really a developed eclogue, an idyll which
had been expanded from a single scene into a drama. The first
dramatic pastoral which is known to exist is the Favola di Orfeo
of Politian, which was represented at Mantua in 1472. This
poem, which has been elegantly translated by J. A. Symonds,
was a tragedy, with choral passages, on an idyllic theme, and is
perhaps too grave in tone to be considered as a pure piece of
pastoral. It led the way more directly to tragedy than to
pastoral, and it is the Il Sagrifizio of Agostino Beccari, which
was played at the court of Ferrara in 1554. that is always quoted
as the first complete and actual dramatic pastoral in European
literature.
In the west of Europe there were various efforts made in the direction of non-dramatic pastoral, which it is hard to classify. Early in the 16th century Alexander Barclay, in England, translated the Latin eclogues of Mantuanus, a scholastic writer of the preceding age. Barnabe Googe, a generation later, in 1563, published his Eglogs, Epytaphes and Sonnettes, a deliberate but not very successful attempt to introduce pastoral into English literature. In France it is difficult to deny the title of pastoral to various productions of the poets of the Pléiade, but especially to Rémy Belleau’s pretty miscellany of prose and verse in praise of a country life, called La Bergerie (1565). But the final impulse was given to non-dramatic pastoral by the publication, in 1504, of the famous Arcadia of J. Sannazaro, a work which passed through sixty editions before the close of the 16th century, and which was abundantly copied. Torquato Tasso followed Beccari after an interval of twenty years, and by the success of his Aminta, which was performed before the court of Ferrara in 1573, secured the popularity of dramatic pastoral. Most of the existing works in this class may be traced back to the influence either of the Arcadia or of the Aminta. Tasso was immediately succeeded by Alvisio Pasqualigo, who gave a comic turn to pastoral drama, and by Cristoforo Castelletti, in whose hands it grew heroic and romantic, while, finally, Guarini produced in 1590 his famous Pastor Fido, and Ongaro his fishermen’s pastoral of Alceo in 1591. During the last quarter of the 16th century pastoral drama was really a power in Italy. Some of the best poetry of the age was written in this form, to be acted privately on the stages of the little court theatres, that were everywhere springing up. In a short time music was introduced, and rapidly predominated, until the little forms of tragedy, and pastoral altogether, were merged in opera.
With the reign of Elizabeth a certain tendency to pastoral was introduced in England. In Gascoigne and in Whetstone traces have been observed of a tendency towards the form and spirit of eclogue. It has been conjectured that this tendency, combined with the study of the few extant eclogues of Clémont Marot, led Spenser to the composition of what is the finest example of pastoral in the English language, the Shepherd’s Calendar, printed in 1579. This famous work is divided into twelve eclogues, and it is remarkable because of the constancy with which Spenser turns in it from the artificial Latin style of pastoral then popular in Italy, and takes his inspiration direct from Theocritus. It is important to note that this is the first effort made in European literature to bring upon a pastoral stage the actual rustics of a modern country, using their own peasant dialect. That Spenser’s attempt was very imperfectly carried out does not militate against the genuineness of the effort, which the very adoption of such names as Willie and Cuddle, instead of the customary Damon and Daphnis, is enough to prove. Having led up to this work, the influence of which was to be confined to England, we return to Sannazaro’s Arcadia, which left its mark upon every literature in Europe. This remarkable romance, which was the type and the original of so many succeeding pastorals, is written in rich but not laborious periods of musical prose, into which are inserted at frequent intervals passages of verse, contests between shepherds on the “humile fistula di Coridone,” or laments for the death of some beautiful virgin. The characters move in a world of supernatural and brilliant beings; they commune without surprise with “i gloriosi spiriti degli boschi,” and reflect with singular completeness their author’s longing for an innocent voluptuous existence, with no hell or heaven in the background.
It was in Spain that the influence of the Arcadia made itself most rapidly felt outside Italy. The earliest Spanish eclogues had been those of Juan de Encina, acted in 1492. Gil Vicente, who was also a Portuguese writer, had written Spanish religious pastorals early in the 16th century. But Garcilaso de la Vega is the founder of Spanish pastoral. His first eclogue. El Dulce lamentar de los pastores, is considered one of the finest poems of its kind in ancient or in modern literature. He wrote little, and died early, in 1536. Two Portuguese poets followed him, and composed pastorals in Spanish, Francisco de Sá de Miranda, who imitated Theocritus, and the famous Jorge de Montemayor, whose Diana (1524) was founded on Sannazaro’s Arcadia. Caspar Gil Polo, after the death of Montemayor in 1561, completed his romance, and published in 1564 a Diana enamorada. It will be recollected that both these works are mentioned with respect, in their kind, by Cervantes. The author of Don Quixote himself published an admirable pastoral romance, Galatea, in 1584.
In France there has always been so strong a tendency towards a graceful sort of bucolic literature that it is hard to decide what should and what should not be mentioned here. The charming pastourelles of the 13th century, with their knight on horseback and shepherdess by the roadside, need not detain us further than to hint that when the influence of Italian pastoral began to be felt in France these earlier lyrics gave it a national inclination. We have mentioned the Bergerie of Rémy Belleau, in which the art of Sannazaro seems to join hands with the simple sweetness of the medieval pastourelle. But there was nothing in France that could compare with the school of Spanish pastoral writers which we have just noticed. Even the typical French pastoral, the Astrée of Honoré d’Urfé (1610), has almost more connexion with the knightly romances which Cervantes laughed at than with the pastorals which he praised. The famous Astrée was
