Before proceeding further, we must take advantage of the mention of Tasso, and make reference to another form of composition, of which the Italians were always peculiarly fond, and which much affected the rest of Europe for nearly two centuries. We have seen how the Greek Theocritus wrote idylls of country life in Sicily, and how Virgil composed pastoral eclogues on Italian soil. After the Renaissance—even the earlier wave of that name—the writers of Italy took up these themes and began to dwell again on country scenes, and on the delights of an ideal pastoral life, as far removed as possible from the vicious and troublous realities of their cities. Boccaccio, Poliziano, Sannazaro, Mantuanus are steps in the history of such pastoral before Tasso. The poet of _Jerusalem Delivered_ does not disdain this region of poetry. In his pastoral drama _Aminta_ he places his highly cultivated and courtly shepherds, shepherdesses, and nymphs on the hills about Sorrento, and lends to their external life as much pretence at reality as he can command. But he is above all things a poet, and only secondarily a dramatist, and it is upon the lyrics that the chief effect is staked. What the great Tasso did, others must do, and at the end of the sixteenth century there are more than a dozen Italian verse-writers composing in similar strain. The chief is Guarini, with his _Pastor Fido_, destined to become well-known in an English shape as Fletcher’s _Faithful Shepherdess_. But Tasso, as has just been said, was not the first to revive the pastoral. It was a century since Poliziano had written a _Favola di Orfeo_, a dramatic eclogue blending idyll and tragedy. But greatest among such predecessors had been the Neapolitan Sannazaro, who in 1504 had published the _Arcadia_, a medley of romance and eclogue, partly in prose, partly in verse, which gave its shape to our own _Arcadia_, the polished, if long and often tiresome, work of Sir Philip Sidney. Sannazaro indeed practically invented that mythical Arcady, or rural Utopia, into which poets and prose-writers have since made so many journeys in order to find a land where there still lingers the golden age of innocence and felicity amid bowers of beauty, where hard facts and bad weather never intrude. Another writer, Battista of Mantua—commonly called “the Mantuan”—composing in Latin, had also become a famous model in the pastoral kind for all western Europe. Readers of _Love’s Labour’s Lost_ need hardly be told that “good old Mantuan” was a Latin school-book in Shakespeare’s boyhood, and had also been imitated by Barclay, and translated by Turbervile. From him, partly direct and partly through the medium of the French Marot, came the cue for Spenser’s _Shepheard’s Calender_ and its progeny. In the Elizabethan age, pastorals and pastoral plays were numerous, and among the writers must be reckoned Lyly, Lodge, Greene, Peele, and Giles Fletcher. * * * * *