Bembo and Molza, nevertheless, only followed in the track of the gifted man whom we have already seen so influential in the development of Italian prose--Jacopo Sannazaro. Sannazaro’s attention was, indeed, principally given to Latin poetry. But the qualifications of an eminent Latinist and of a pattern Petrarchist were much the same. Both abdicated all claim to originality by setting before themselves a model which it was taken for granted--and with justice--that they would be for ever unable to rival. Sannazaro was, notwithstanding, something more than a master of felicitous expression. His Virgilian _De Partu Virginis_, in which he vied with the chief contemporary writers of Latin hexameters, Vida and Fracastoro, is less attractive than his elegies, into which he has introduced more of personal feeling, or his Piscatorian Eclogues, in which he has successfully revived the form, if not the spirit, of ancient composition, and from which Milton did not disdain to borrow ornaments for _Lycidas_. As a follower of Petrarch, Sannazaro stands on a different footing from Bembo and Molza. Their excellence in their own way is indisputable, but monotonous: they neither rise nor sink; every poem of theirs is just as good as every other poem. Sannazaro, a man of noble character and strong feeling, imports a personal note into his poetry, and succeeds in proportion to the clearness with which he can render this audible. His praise of Petrarch’s Laura, for instance, is something more than conventionality, and these lines, _Mors et Vita_, translated by Glassford, express the sum of much serious meditation: _Alas! when I behold this empty show Of life, and think how soon it shall have fled; When I consider how the honoured head is daily struck by death’s mysterious blow, My heart is wasted like the melting snow, And hope, that comforter, is nearly dead; Seeing these wings have been so long outspread, And yet so sluggish is my flight and low. But if I therefore should complain and weep-- If chide with love, or fortune, or the fair-- No cause I have; myself must bear it all, Who, like a man 'mid trifles lulled to sleep, With death beside me, feed on empty air, Nor think how soon this mouldering garb must fall._ Among Sannazaro’s contemporaries, a little too early to have imbibed the full spirit of the Petrarchan revival, may be especially named Antonio Tebaldeo (1463-1537), an admired poet who survived his reputation; Serafino dell’ Aquila, imitated by Wyat, whose Neapolitan vehemence betrayed his lively talent into bombast; Antonio Cammelli, the political laureate of the Ferrarese court; Antonello Petrucci, who wrote as Damocles banqueted, with the headsman’s axe suspended over him; Notturno Neapolitano; and Filosseno, chiefly remarkable for the undisguised gallantry of his sonnets addressed to Lucrezia Borgia.