The _Arcadia_ is the first English example of the prose pastoral romance, as the _Shepherd's Calendar_ is of our pastoral verse.
Imitative essays in its style kept appearing for two hundred years after it, till Wordsworth and other poets who knew the country drove its unrealities out of literature.

The aim of it and of the school to which it belonged abroad was to find a setting for a story which should leave the author perfectly free to plant in it any improbability he liked, and to do what he liked with the relations of his characters.

In the shade of beech trees, the coils of elaborated and intricate love-making wind and unravel themselves through an endless afternoon.

In that art nothing is too far-fetched, nothing too sentimental, no sorrow too unreal.

The pastoral romance was used, too, to cover other things besides a sentimental and decorative treatment of love.