id scio (sed neque si scio, sat scio, sed tamen ausim
dicere—quid?) (III. 12-14).
his igitur quae scire nefas nescire necesse est
posthabitis (III. 41-42).
He may overlook an awkward internal rhyme.
quae mea sit me cogit amor sententia fari
liberaque ora facit (II. 160-61).
But generally he is as accomplished in ease as in classicism.
Six years after Mantuan’s collection, another Italian writer of Latin eclogues, Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530), published a vernacular pastoral, Arcadia (1504),[31] so widely popular as to become almost the sixteenth-century type. Though the name is Greek, Arcadia and Arcadian have been ever since reminiscent of Sannazaro. Through him, more than through any other single influence, vernacular pastoral spread over western Europe. For he gathered up in prose narrative with verse interludes most of what pastoral in its long history had become. Saturated in Vergil, familiar among the other Latin poets and with Greek, he had caught the possibilities of Boccaccio’s Ameto; and though he weaves throughout from literature, never directly from life, he was artist enough to weave originally. The Arcadia shows Renaissance imitation at its best.
Apter most often to attract the eye are the tall and spreading trees reared by nature on rugged mountains than the cultivated plants pruned by expert hands in decorative gardens; and much apter to please the ear the wild birds singing on green branches amid solitary thickets than among city crowds the trained ones in winsome and decorated cages. For which reason the woodland songs, too, methinks, inscribed in the stiff bark of beeches no less delight the reader than the choice verses written on the fair pages of illuminated volumes; and the waxed reeds of the shepherds in their flowery valleys offer perchance a pleasanter sound than the polished and vaunted instruments of the musicians in halls of ceremony. And who doubts that more attractive to human minds is a fountain springing naturally from the living rock, surrounded by green herbage, than all the others made by art of whitest marble resplendent with gold? Surely, as I believe, no one. Relying, therefore, on this, I may well on these deserted slopes, to the listening trees and to such few shepherds as may be there, tell the rude eclogues springing from the vein of nature, leaving them as bare of ornament as I heard them sung by the shepherds of Arcadia to the liquid murmur of their fountains. For to these not once, but a thousand times, the mountain gods, won by their sweetness, gave attentive ear; and the tender nymphs, forgetting to chase their wandering prey, left their quivers and bows beneath the lofty pines of Menalus and Lycus. Whence I, if I may, would rather have the glory of putting my lips to the humble reed of Corydon, given him long ago by Dametas as a precious gift, than to the resounding clarinet of Pallas, with which the presumptuous satyr challenged Apollo to his own destruction. For surely it is better to cultivate well a little plot than to leave a great one by ill management foully crowded with stubble.