carry out the law, when Carino, who has been seeking his reputed son Mirtillo, comes in, and while attempting to make out that he is a foreigner, and therefore not capable of satisfying the law by his death, brings unwittingly to light circumstances that prove that he is in truth a son of Montano, and therefore a descendant of the god Hercules. It thus appears that a marriage between Mirtillo and Amaryllis will exactly satisfy the conditions demanded by the oracle. There is an under-plot, which consists in providing a lover and a marriage for the woman-hater Silvio. He is loved in vain by the nymph Dorinda, whom he unintentionally wounds with an arrow while out hunting. The pity he feels for her wound softens his heart towards her, and all parties are made happy by this second marriage. Such is a skeleton of the story of the "Pastor Fido." It will be observed that there is more approach to a plot and to human interest than in any previous production of this kind, and some of the situations are well conceived for dramatic effect. And accordingly the success which it achieved was immediate and immense. Nor, much as the taste of the world has been changed since that day, has it ever lost its place in the estimation of cultivated Italians. It would be wholly uninteresting to attempt any account of the wide-spreading literary controversies to which the publication of the "Pastor Fido" gave rise. The author terms it a tragi-comedy; and this title was violently attacked. The poet himself, as may well be imagined from the idiosyncrasy of the man, was not slow to reply to his critics, and did so in two lengthy treatises entitled from the name of a contemporary celebrated actor, "Verato primo," and "Verato secondo," which are printed in the four-quarto-volume edition of his works, but which probably no mortal eye has read for the last two hundred years!