mention are three dramatic adaptations, Shirley’s Arcadia (1640), Fanshawe’s Pastor Fido (1646), and Leonard Willan's Astraea (1651). The last pastoral drama in the 17th century was Settle’s Pastor Fido (1677). The Restoration was extremely unfavourable to this species of literature. Sir Charles Sedley, Aphra Behn and Congreve published eclogues, and the Pastoral Dialogue between Thirsis and Strephon of the first-mentioned was much admired. All of these, however, are in the highest degree insipid and unreal, and partook of the extreme artificiality of the age.
Pastoral came into fashion again early in the 18th century. The controversy in the Guardian, the famous critique on Ambrose Philips’s Pastorals, the anger and rivalry of Pope, and the doubt which must always exist as to Steele’s share in the mystification, give 1708 a considerable importance in the annals of bucolic writing. Pope had written his idylls first, and it was a source of infinite annoyance to him that Phillips contrived to precede him in publication. He succeeded in throwing ridicule on Philips, however, and his own pastorals were greatly admired. Yet there was some nature in Phillips, and, though Pope is more elegant and faultless, he is not one whit more genuinely bucolic than his rival. A far better writer of pastoral than either is Gay, whose Shepherd’s Week was a serious attempt to throw to the winds the ridiculous Arcadian tradition of nymphs and swains, and to copy Theocritus in his simplicity. Gay was far more successful in executing this pleasing and natural cycle of poems than in writing his pastoral tragedy of Dione or his “tragi-comico pastoral farce” of The What d’ye call it? (1715). He deserves a very high place in the history of English pastoral on the score of his Shepherd’s Week. Swift proposed to Gay that he should write a Newgate pastoral in which the swains and nymphs should talk and warble in slang. This Gay never did attempt; but a northern admirer of his and Pope’s achieved a veritable and lasting success in Lowland Scotch, a dialect then considered no less beneath the dignity of verse. Allan Ramsay’s Gentle Shepherd, published in 1725, was the last, and remains the most vertebrate and interesting, bucolic drama produced in Great Britain. It remained a favourite, a hundred and fifty years after, among Lowland reapers and milkmaids.
With the Gentle Shepherd the chronicle of pastoral in England practically closes. This is at least the last performance which can be described as a developed eclogue of the school of Tasso and Guarini. It is in Switzerland that we find the next important revival of pastoral properly so-called. The taste of the 18th century was very agreeably tickled by the religious idylls of Salomon Gessner, who died in 1787. His Daphnis und Phillis and Der Tod Abels were read and imitated throughout Europe. In German literature they left but little mark, but in France they were cleverly copied by Arnaud Berquin. A much more important pastoral writer is Jean Pierre Clovis de Florian, who began by imitating the Galatea of Cervantes, and continued with an original bucolic romance entitled Estelle. It has always been noticeable that pastoral is a form of literature which disappears before a breath of ridicule. Neither Gessner nor his follower Abbt were able to survive the laughter of Herder. Since Florian and Gessner there has been no reappearance of bucolic literature properly so-called. The whole spirit of romanticism was fatal to pastoral. Voss in his Luise and Goethe in Hermann und Dorothea replaced it by poetic scenes from homely and simple life.
Half a century later something like pastoral reappeared in a totally new form, in the fashion for Dorfgeschichten. About 1830 the Danish poet S. S. Blicher, whose work connects the grim studies of George Crabbe with the milder modern strain of pastoral, began to publish his studies of out-door romance among the poor in Jutland. Immermann followed in Germany with his novel Der Oberhof in 1839. Auerbach, who has given to the 19th-century idyll its peculiar character, began to publish his Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten in 1843. Meanwhile George Sand was writing Jeanne in 1844, which was followed by La Mare au Diable and François le Champi, and in England Clough produced in 1848 his remarkable long-vacation pastoral The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich. It seems almost certain that these writers followed a simultaneous but independent impulse in this curious return to bucolic life, in which, however, in every case, the old tiresome conventionality and affectation of lady-like airs and graces were entirely dropped. This school of writers was presently enriched in Norway by Björnson, whose Synnöve Solbakken was the first of an exquisite series of pastoral romances. But perhaps the best of all modern pastoral romances is Fritz Reuter’s Ut mine Stromtid, written in the Mecklenburg dialect of German. In England the Dorsetshire poems of William Barnes and the Dorsetshire novels of Thomas Hardy belong to the same class. It will be noticed, of course, that all these recent productions have so much in common with the literature which is produced around them that they almost evade separate classification. It is conceivable that some poet, in following the antiquarian tendency of the age, may enshrine his fancy once more in the five acts of a pure pastoral drama of the school of Tasso and Fletcher, but any great vitality in pastoral is hardly to be looked for in the future. (E. G.)
PASTORAL EPISTLES, the name given to St Paul’s letters
to Timothy and Titus. The term seems to have originated
with J. A. L. Wegscheider (1771–1849), professor at Halle.
The three epistles mentioned are written to men rather than
churches, and to men appointed to certain pastoral work. In
this respect they differ from the personal and intimate note
which Paul wrote to Philemon. They are closely related in
origin, style, diction and thought, and occupy so distinct a
place in these respects that the Pauline authorship of them has
been much questioned. (See Timothy, Epistles to; Titus, Epistle to.)
PASTORAL LETTER, an open letter addressed by a bishop
to the clergy or laity of his diocese, or to both, containing either
general admonition, instruction or consolation, or directions for
behaviour in particular circumstances. In the Catholic Church
such letters are also sent out regularly at particular ecclesiastical
seasons, particularly at the beginning of fasts. In the non-episcopal
Protestant churches the name “pastoral letter” is
given to any open letter addressed by a pastor to his congregation,
but more especially to that customarily issued at certain
seasons, e.g. by the moderator of a Presbyterian assembly or the
chairman of a Congregational or Baptist union.
PASTORAL STAFF, in the Christian Church, an ensign of office
or dignity. It is some five feet long, ending at the top in a
crook (volute) bent inwards, and made of metal, ivory or wood.
If of metal, it is hollow; if of wood, it is usually covered with
metal. The crook is usually richly ornamented, and is divided
from the shaft by a boss; the shaft is commonly separated into
sections by rings, so that it can be taken to pieces.
The pastoral staff is the ensign proper of cardinals (except cardinal-deacons) and bishops; but the former are entitled to use it only in the churches from which they derive their titles, the latter only in their dioceses. The pope so early as the time of Innocent III. did not carry the pastoral staff, and it would seem never to have been his custom. The ferula that the Ordo of Cencius Sabellius (ch. 48) speaks of was not a pastoral staff, but the symbol of authority over the papal palace, with which by its transference he was invested. This ferula, mentioned by Luitprand of Cremona in his account of the deposition of Benedict V., and the baculus aureus of the Historia dedicationis ecclesiae cavensis (Acta Sanctorum, 4 March, i. 354) are sceptres. Abbots carry the pastoral staff only when specially empowered by the pope to do so, and then only in the territory under the jurisdiction of their monastery and in the churches subordinated to it. With certain restrictions the pastoral staff is also sometimes conceded to dignitaries of cathedral and collegiate churches, but never to abbesses (Sacra Congreg. Rit. 29 Jan. 1656).
The pastoral staff, as its name implies, symbolizes the pastoral office and authority, a symbolism already known to Isidore of Seville (De ecclesiast. off. ii. 5). This symbolism is expressed in the words used, at least since the 10th century, by the consecrator in delivering the pastoral staff at the consecration of a
