Sannazaro’s _Arcadia_, historically the most important of his writings, is comparatively a youthful performance, having been substantially completed by 1489, though not published in a correct edition until 1504. It would in any case mark an epoch as the first perfect example of the pastoral romance, which Boccaccio had foreshadowed in his _Ameto_, but which Sannazaro enriched by elements derived from Theocritus and Virgil. His landscape and personages are entirely classical; the shepherds contend with each other in song precisely as in the Greek and Latin eclogues, and no attempt is made to represent rustic manners as they really are. The descriptions, whether of nature or of humanity, on the other hand, are graceful and vivid, and informed by a most poetical sentiment; and it may be said that Sannazaro’s work would be more esteemed at this day if it had had fewer imitators. The style admits of but little variety, and pastoral fiction easily became insipid in the hands of a succession of followers who did not, like Shakespeare in the _Winter’s Tale_, resort to Nature for their delineations. Sannazaro himself is not exempt from the charge of monotony. More serious defects, however, are those of excessive Latinisation in the construction of sentences, and rhetorical exaggeration, arising from his too close adherence to the immature style of Boccaccio’s early writings, instead of the simple elegance of the _Decameron_. The resolution to achieve poetry in prose at any cost, causes a crabbed involution and overloads the diction with adjectives; while there is yet enough of true feeling to overcome even the wearisomeness of the perpetual laments of the shepherds over the unparalleled cruelty of their innamoratas. Sannazaro had a mistress to whose memory he remained faithful all his life, and most of his fictitious characters veil actual personages. When this is understood, the romance loses its apparent artificiality; and Settembrini’s remark is justified, “_Anche oggi si sente una dolcezza d’ affetto a leggere quel libro_.” The main literary interest, however, of the _Arcadia_ is that it marks an epoch and carries the reform which Lorenzo de’ Medici and Politian had initiated in verse into the domain of prose. It is perhaps the sole Italian prose composition of the fifteenth century which can be said to wear a classic stamp; and being received with enthusiasm and read by all, it fixed a standard which subsequent writers were compelled to maintain. It prescribed the rule for pastoral romance in all languages: not only did Sidney borrow its spirit and many of its episodes as well as its name for his own work, more, however, of a romance and less of a pastoral than Sannazaro’s; not only did the two great Portuguese pastoralists, Bernardim Ribeiro and Montemayor, model themselves upon it; but Shakespeare took from it the name of Ophelia, and traces of it may be found, not only in the pastoral part of Keats’s _Endymion_, but even in his _Hyperion_.