Well was I while under shade
Oaten reeds me music made,
Striving with my mates in song;
Mixing mirth our songs among.
Greater was the shepherd's treasure
Than this false, fine, courtly pleasure.

A happy and substantial pastime of a leisurely Elizabethan
nobleman, the Arcadiain its original form was merely circulated
in manuscript among the author's friends. Addressing his sister
in the dedication of his romance, he reminds her of the informal
circumstances of its composition. "Your dear self can best wit-
ness," he declares, "the manner of its writing, being done in
loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest by
sheets sent you as fast as they were done." The published ver-
sion did not appear until 1590, after the author's death.

The romance is a composite of all sorts of pleasing tales which
Sidney had encountered in the course of his own wide reading.
It reveals the influence of types of fiction of other lands and ages
from which English story-tellers were borrowing freely. There
were the Italian novelle, best known through Boccaccio, with
their mingled interest in manners and intrigue; the Greek ro-
mances, tardy offspring of the ancient epic tradition, with their
fondness for the picturesque and paradoxical, for tales of ship-
wreck, pirates, oracles, and disguises, exposed infants, mistaken
identity and other fanciful complications; the Renaissance
pastorals, with their serene detachment from real life, their style
pleasantly commingling prose and verse; the Spanish romances
of chivalry, late and sensational successors to the medieval
metrical romance; and, finally, the rogue story which hurled
a cynical defiance at romantic illusion. Of these various in-
gredients Sidney Arcadiais composed. Its interest centers,
more or less, in the adventures in love and war of two com-
panion-knights, Musidorus and Pyrocles, separated at the begin-
ning of the story by shipwreck. Musidorus, when rescued, is
conducted by shepherds to the home of Kalander through whom

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