Of course the Eclogues of Virgil were read generation by generation, if not very understandingly, through the Middle Ages. Still the more sensitive felt the appeal of mountain shadows lengthening over the evening meadows and the pathos of love-lorn shepherds sighing musically for hard-hearted shepherdesses. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the pastoral mode becomes once more contemporary, incidentally in the interludes of Bocaccio’s _Decameron_, explicitly in his idyl of alternate prose and verse, the _Ameto_. These are pale lights before the dawn. Pastoralism becomes widely current in the _Arcadia_ of Jacopo Sannazaro, the bulk of which was ready by 1489. It is the parent of those slow-moving, sentimental, and ever lengthy romances in verse and prose of which Sir Philip Sidney’s _Arcadia_ is the most familiar to the modern reader. Dante had once longed for a magic boat in which congenial souls should drift forever and do nothing but discourse of love. Transfer these discourses to a leafy nook beside a running stream, with the herds in view below the branches, and nymphs and satyrs overhearing the debate—and you have Sannazaro’s _Arcadia_. We have the eternal poetry and perhaps eternal fallacy of a bygone golden age where duty and effort are absent, where love and poesy reign. In his most famous song, _Alma beata_, Sannazaro, celebrating a dead beauty, makes heaven itself merely an Arcadia— “Other mountains, other plains, Other groves and streamlets In heaven I see, and withal new blossoms. Other fauns and sylvans, through sweet summer places, Pursue their nymphs in happier loves than ours.” You find the mood clear cut in the Venetian nobleman and prelate, Pietro Bembo, both in his _Asolani_ and in the separate poems. These were being handed about in Giorgione’s time, from 1500 on. Thus Bembo sings of the shepherd’s life: “Tryphon, who in place of ministrants and lackeys, Loggias and marbles, woven gold and purple, Lovest about thee willows leafy, cloister Of joyous hillocks, plants and rivulets— Well may the world admire thee.” Naturally the denizens of such paradises live and dress in a state of nature. The nymphs are lightly clothed and readily discard their slight draperies for the joys of the bath, which they considerately take within the range of their shepherd swains. Bembo warmly praises those “courteous garments” which do not too much hide the fair throat and bosom, and roundly curses more churlish concealing fashions. Sannazaro describes with a confusing mixture of metaphors what may be called a fortunate bath fall. “Leading one day my herds beside a stream, I saw a light amid those waters fair, Which bound me fast straightway with two blond tresses, And stamped a face all milk and roses Forever on my heart.”