Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/367

 P A S P A S 345 satisfactorily vindicated on grounds of internal evidence by Mr James Gairdner of the Record Office in No. 11 of the same periodical. Within a year Mr Gairdner s position was established by the discovery (1865) of the originals of the fifth volume at Mr Serjeant Frere s house at Dungate, Cambridgeshire. In 1875 the original MSS. of the third and fourth, with many additional letters, were found at the family mansion of the Freres at Roydon Hall, near Diss. The MSS. presented to the king have not been found, and were probably appropriated by some person about the court. In 1872-75 Mr Gairdner published a most careful and accurate edition in three volumes in Arber s English reprints, accompanied with valuable introductions to each volume, including an historical survey of the reign of Henry VI., notes, and index, and incorporating more than four hundred additional letters derived from Magdalen College, Oxford, and other quarters. Abstracts of some of the additional letters discovered at Roydon were added in an appendix. . The total number of documents printed wholly or in abstract is one thousand and six. A thousand family letters of the 15th century must in any case be full of interest; the Paston letters are peculiarly interesting from the importance and in some respects the representative character of the family. The founder was Clement Paston, a humble peasant living at the end of the 14th century, who throve in the world and gave his son William the sound education which enabled him to rise to the position of justice of the common pleas. Judge Paston acquired much landed property in Norfolk, and in the days of his son John, in 1459, the family was greatly enriched by a bequest from the stout old soldier but grasping usurer Sir John Fastolf, a kinsman of Sir John Paston s wife. The Pastons, however, were even at that time greatly harassed by rival claimants to their estates ; and Sir John s legacy involved them in a fresh set of troubles and contentions, which were not allayed until the time of the third Sir John Paston, about 1480. This perturbed state of affairs imparts especial interest to the correspondence, causing it to reflect the general condition of England during the period. It was a time of trouble, when the weakness of the Government had disorganized the administration in every branch, when the succession to the crown itself was contested, when great nobles lived in a condition of civil war, when the prevalent anarchy and discontent found expression in tumultuary insurrections like Cade s, countenanced, as the Paston letters show, by persons of condition, when any man s property might be assailed with or without colour of law by covetous rivals, and upstart families like the Pastons were especially exposed to attack. The correspondence therefore exhibits them 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 people with the law, which was evidently indispensable to a person of substance. In its broader aspects the corre spondence exhibits human nature much as it is now, except for the notable deficiency in public spirit, and the absence of large views or worthy interests in life. The contrast with our own times is instructive, showing how largely commerce and literature, art and travel, have contributed to augment moral and intellectual as well as material wealth. After the death of the second Sir John Paston, grandson of the judge, in 1479, the letters become scanty and of merely personal interest. The family continued to flourish. In the next century it produced Clement Paston, a distinguished naval commander under Henry VIII. ; and in the days of Charles II. Sir Robert Paston was raised to the peerage as earl of Yarmouth. His son dissipated the hereditary property, and the title and the family became extinct upon his death in 1732. (R. o.) PASTORAL is the name given to a certain class of modern literature in which the &quot;idyl&quot; of the Greeks and the &quot; eclogue&quot; 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 idyl 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 Mr 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 II 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 pro ductions of the poets of the Pleiade, but especially to Remy 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 G. 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 Al visit &amp;gt; 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. 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 every where 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 con jectured that this tendency, combined with the study of the few extant eclogues of Clement 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 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 litera- XVIIT. 44