Bembo’s Latin poetry, of which charming specimens may be seen in Symonds’s _Renaissance_, is better than his Italian, for it does not disappoint. The fame of FRANCESCO MARIA MOLZA (1489-1544) was in his day hardly second to Bembo’s, and was based on much the same grounds. Like Bembo, he was an elegant Latin poet, who carried the maxims appropriate for composition in a dead language into a living one. Like Bembo’s, his vernacular poems, with one remarkable exception, are models of diction as inexpressive as harmonious--a perpetual silvery chime which soothes the ear, but conveys nothing to the mind. The exception is a poem in which the usual vagueness and emptiness of sentiment assumes substance from its pastoral setting. The _Ninfa Tiberina_, in which one of Molza’s innumerable light loves is idealised as a shepherdess, is just such a piece of mosaic as Gray’s Elegy. The author has amassed all the commonplaces of pastoral poetry, and, without adding a single idea of his own, has combined them into so rich and glowing a picture that he may well claim to have superseded the entire school of pastoral versifiers, the few excepted who have derived their inspiration from Nature, like his predecessor Politian. “Molza is to Politian,” says Symonds, “as the rose to the rosebud.” He was born at Modena, but lived chiefly at Rome, leaving his wife and family in his native city. They would indeed have been much in the way, for he was continually involved in some amour, and his irregular ties ultimately proved fatal to him. He was a leading member of the brilliant literary circles of Rome and Florence, and as a companion and a man of letters his contemporaries have nothing but praise for him. Petrarch is a poet as much within the scope of imitation as beyond the pursuit of rivalry. The swarms of Petrarchists stun the ear and darken the light of the period: Tansillo might well say that every hillock had grown a Parnassus. They may be found in the thesaurus of Dolce, a series whose continuous publication for so many years at all events affords proof that this appetite for imitative verse was not factitious. Some few stand forth from the crowd by some exceptional characteristics, and it is of these only that we can speak. The first of these in chronological order is BERNARDO TASSO (1493-1568), whom we have already met as the author of the _Amadigi_. In his lyrical as in his epical attempts, Tasso is one of those provoking poets who are always trembling on the verge of excellence, ever good, hardly ever quite good enough. Even the famous sonnet on his renunciation of his lady, which, Dolce tells us, thrilled Italy, is less eminent for the beauty of the poetry than the nobility of the sentiment. Once, however, straying within the domain of pastoral poetry, he found and polished a gem worthy of the Greek Anthology: