h was the hope of FRANCOIS DE SALES (1567-1622), Bishop of Geneva,
when, in 1608, he published his _Introduction a la Vie Devote_. The
angelic doctor charmed by his mere presence, his grace of person,
his winning smile, his dove's eyes; he showed how amiable piety might
be; his eloquence was festooned with blossoms; he strewed the path
to heaven with roses; he conquered by docility; yet under his
sweetness lay strength, and to methodise and popularise moral
self-superintendence was to achieve much. The _Traite de l'Amour de
Dieu_ (1616), while it expounds the highest reaches of mystical
devotion, yet presents religion as accessible to every child of God.
With his tender and ardent devotion, something of a poet's sentiment
for nature was united; but mysticism and poetry were both subservient
to his aim of regulating the conduct of the heart; he desired to show
how one may remain in the world, and yet not be of the world; by personal
converse and by his spiritual letters he became the director of
courtiers and of ladies. The motto of the literary Academy which he
founded at Annecy expresses his spirit--_flores fructusque
perennes_--flowers for their own sake, but chiefly for the sake of
fruit. Much of the genius for holiness of the courtly saint has passed
into the volume of reminiscences by Bishop Camus, his companion and
disciple--_l'Esprit de Saint Francois de Sales_.

A mundane society, however, where fine gentlemen and ladies meet to
admire and be admired, needs other outlets for its imagination than
that of the primrose way to Paradise. The labour of the fields had
inspired Olivier de Serres with the prose Georgics of his _Theatre
d'Agriculture_, a work directed towards utility; the romance of the
fields, and the pastoral, yet courtly, loves of a French Arcady, were
the inspiration of the endless prose bucolics found in the _Astree_
of HONORE D'URFE. The Renaissance delight in the pastoral had passed
from Italy to Spain; through the _Diana_ of the Spanish Montemayor
it passed to France. After a period of turbulent strife there was
a fascination in visions of a peace, into which, if warfare entered,
the strange irruption only enhanced an habitual calm. A whole
generation waited long to learn the issue of the passion of Celadon
and Astree. The romance, of which the earliest part appeared in 1610,
or earlier, was not completely published until 1627, when its author
was no longer living.[1] The scene is laid in the fiel