It is significant of the difference between the Italian mind and the Spanish, and of the extent to which the former had emancipated itself from mediævalism, that the _Rappresentazione_, touching so nearly on the confines of the Spanish _Auto_, never developed into that or any allied variety of the drama. The abstractions of the vices and virtues, so natural to the Spaniard and the man of the Middle Age in general, were uncongenial to the Italian, whose _Rappresentazioni_ were always peopled by definite, tangible persons, even if of the spiritual order. The _Adamo_ of Andreini, early in the seventeenth century, from which Milton undoubtedly derived his first idea of treating the Fall in a miracle play, might have led to a development in this direction, but remained an isolated eccentricity. The true national development lay in quite another path, the pastoral drama. Something like this might be found in Gil Vicente, but we may be certain that his works were totally unknown in Italy, and that the pastoral play grew out of such romances as the Arcadia, such eclogues as those of Baptista Mantuanus, and the court masques in which the principal parts were taken by shepherds and shepherdesses. Politian’s _Orfeo_ is not very far from being such a piece, although it is a good deal more. A pastoral masque was composed as early as 1506 by Castiglione for the amusement of the court of Urbino. Others followed from time to time, and developed into a real pastoral drama by Beccari in 1554; but the literary pretensions of this class of composition continued to be very slender until it was virtually created by Tasso’s _Aminta_ in 1573. Few novel experiments in literature have enjoyed a more immediate or more permanent success. Numerous as were the _Aminta’s_ imitators, its primacy has never but once been seriously challenged, and its nature and simplicity have in general been justly preferred to the more elaborate artifice of the _Pastor Fido_. It is indeed deficient in the rich poetry of its English rival, the _Faithful Shepherdess_, “as inferior, poetically speaking,” says Leigh Hunt, “as a lawn with a few trees on it is to the depths of a forest.” But Leigh Hunt confesses its superiority in “true dramatic skill, and flesh and blood interest”: it is indeed as far as anything can be from the insipidity usually associated with pastoral compositions. It has, moreover, more of the genuine yearning for the golden age, the spirit which inspires Keats’s _Endymion_, than is found in the fanciful dramas of Fletcher, or Milton, or Ben Jonson. “The central motive of _Aminta_ and the _Pastor Fido_,” says Symonds, “is the contrast between the actual world of ambition, treachery, and sordid strife, and the ideal world of pleasure, loyalty, and tranquil ease.”