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In any case, it is difficult to take a deep interest in Cervantes's seventy-onessss1 shepherds and shepherdesses. Their sensibility is too exquisite for this world. Among the swains, Lisandro, Silenio, Mireno, Grisaldo, Erastro, Damon, Telesio, Lauso, and Lenio weep most copiously. Among the nymphs, Galatea, Lidia, Rosaura, Teolinda, Maurisa, Nisida and Blanca choke with tears. Teolinda, Leonarda and Rosaura swoon; Silerio, Timbrio, Darinto, Elicio and Lenio drop down in a dead faint. In mind and body these shepherds and shepherdesses are exceptionally endowed. They can remain awake for days. They can recite, without slurring a [Pg xxxiii] comma, a hundred or two hundred lines of a poem heard once, years ago; and the casuistry of their amorous dialectics would do credit to Sánchez or Escobar. All this is common form. A generation later, Honoré d'Urfé replied to the few who might accuse Astrée of talking above her station:—"Reponds-leur, ma Bergere, que pour peu qu'ils ayent connoissance de toy, ils sçauront que tu n'es pas, ny celles aussi qui te suiuent, de ces Bergeres necessiteuses qui pour gagner leur vie conduisent les troupeaux aux pasturages: mais que vous n'auez toutes pris cette condition que pour viure plus doucement & sans contrainte. Que si vos conceptions & vos paroles estoient veritablement telles que celles des Bergers ordinaires, ils auroient aussi peu de plaisir de vous escouter que vous auriez beaucoup de honte à les redire."ssss1 The plea was held to be good. The pastoral convention of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thrust out all realism as an unclean thing. The pity is that Cervantes, in his effort to conform to the rule, was compelled to stifle what was best and rarest in his genius. Yet, amid these philosophizings and artificialities, a few gleams of his peculiar, parenthetical humour flash from him unawares: as when the refined Teolinda seeks to console Lidia—limpiándole los ojos con la manga de mi camisa:ssss1 or in the description of Crisalvo's fury—que le sacaba de juicio, aunque él tenía tan poco, que poco era menester para acabárselo: or in Arsindo's thoughtful remark that the shepherds might possibly be missed by the flocks from which they had been absent for the last ten days. Again, there is a foreshadowing of a famous passage in Don Quixote when the writer compares the shepherd's life with the courtier's. Once more, the story of Timbrio's adventures—which are anything but idyllic—is given with uncommon spirit. There are ingenuity and fancy in many of the poems, and there is interest as well as grace in the little autobiographical touches—the mention of Arnaute Mamí, the local patriotism that surges up in allusions to the river Henares on which stands the author's native town—el gran Compluto, as he says in his eloquent way.