Ornabam tibi serta domi; Syriumque liquorem
Ad thalamos geminæ, geminæ, tua cura, sorores
Fundebant. Quid pro sertis Syrioque liquore
Liquisti? Sine sole dies, sine sidere noctes,
Insomnes noctes.[436]

Lucia died before her marriage-day, and her grey-headed father went mourning for her, fooled by memory, vainly seeking the joy that could not come again. Had she become, he asks, a star in heaven, and did the blessed gods and heroines enjoy her splendour? No voice replied when he called into the darkness, nor did new constellations beam on him with brightness from his daughter's eyes. All through the wakeful night he mourned, but when dawn went forth he marked a novel lustre on the sea and in the sky. Lucia had been added to the nymphs of morning. She smiled upon her father as she fled before the wheels of day; and now the sun himself arose, and in his light her light was swallowed: Hyperion scaled the heights of heaven with more than his own glory. With this apotheosis of his daughter, so curiously Pagan in feeling, and yet so far from classical in taste, the poem might have ended, had not Pontano reserved its final honours for himself. To Lucia, now made a goddess, he addresses his prayers that she should keep his name and fame alive on earth when he is dead:—

Fama ipsa assistens tumulo cum vestibus aureis,
Ore ingens, ac voce ingens, ingentibus alis,
Per populos late ingenti mea nomina plausu
Vulgabit, titulosque feret per sæcula nostros;
Plaudentesque meis resonabunt laudibus auræ,
Vivet et extento celeber Jovianus in ævo.[437]

Sannazzaro's own elegies on the joys of love and country life, the descriptions of his boyhood at Salerno, the praises of his Villa Mergillina, and his meditations among the ruins of Cumæ, are marked by the same characteristics. Nothing quite so full of sensual enjoyment, so soft, and so voluptuous can be found in the poems of the Florentine and Roman scholars. They deserve study, if only as illustrating the luxurious tone of literature at Naples. It was not by these lighter effusions, however, that Sannazzaro won his fame. The epic on the birth of Christ cost him twenty years of labour; and when it was finished, the learned world of Italy welcomed it as a model of correct and polished writing. At the same time the critics seem to have felt, what cannot fail to strike a modern reader, that the difficulties of treating such a theme in the Virgilian manner, and the patience of the stylist, had rendered it a masterpiece of ingenuity rather than a work of genius.[438] Sannazzaro's epigrams, composed in the spirit of bitterest hostility towards the Borgia family, were not less famous than his epic. Alfonso of Aragon took the poet with him during his campaign against the Papal force in the Abruzzi; and these satires, hastily written in the tent and by the camp-fire, formed the amusement of his officers. From the soldiers of Alfonso they speedily passed, on the lips of courtiers and scholars, through all the cities of Italy; nor is it easy to say how much of Lucrezia Borgia's legend may not be traceable to their brief but envenomed couplets. What had been the scandal of the camp acquired consistency in lines too pungent to be forgotten and too witty to remain unquoted.[439] As a specimen of Sannazzaro's style, the epigram on Venice may here be cited:—

Viderat Hadriacis Venetam Neptunus in undis
Stare urbem, et toto ponere jura mari:
Nunc mihi Tarpeias quantumvis, Jupiter, arces
Objice, et illa tui mœnia Martis, ait:
Si Pelago Tybrim præfers, urbem aspice utramque;
Illam homines dices, hanc posuisse deos.[440]

I have already touched upon the Virgilianism of Sannazzaro's 'Partus Virginis.'[441] What the cold churches of Palladio are to Christian architecture, this frigid epic is to Christian poetry. Leo X. delighted to recognise the Gospel narrative beneath a fancy dress of mythological inventions, and to witness the triumph of classical scholarship in the holy places of the mediæval faith. To fuse the traditions of Biblical and secular antiquity was, as I have often said, the dream of the Renaissance. What Pico and Ficino attempted in philosophical treatises, the poets sought to effect by form. Religion, attiring herself in classic drapery, threw off the cobwebs of the Catacombs, and acquired the right of petites entrées at the Vatican. It did not signify that she had sacrificed her majesty to fashion, or that her tunic à la mode antique was badly made. Her rouge and spangles enchanted the scholarly Pontiff, who forthwith ordered Vida to compose the 'Christiad,' and gave him a benefice at Frascati in order that he might enjoy a poet's ease. Vida's epic, like Sannazzaro's, was not finished during the lifetime of Leo. Both the 'Christiad' and the 'Partus Virginis' reflected lustre on the age of Clement.

Vida won his first laurels in the field of didactic poetry. Virgilian exercises on the breeding of silkworms and the game of chess displayed his faculty for investing familiar subjects with the graces of a polished style.[442] Such poems, whether written in Latin, or, like the 'Api' of Rucellai, in Italian, gratified the taste of the Renaissance, always appreciative of form independent of the matter it invested. For a modern student Vida's metrical treatise in three books on the 'Art of Poetry' has greater interest; since it illustrates the final outcome of classic studies in the age of Leo. The 'Poetica' is addressed to Francis, Dauphin of France, in his Spanish prison:[443]—

Primus ades, Francisce; sacras ne despice Musas,
Regia progenies, cui regum debita sceptra
Gallorum, cum firma annis accesserit ætas.
Hæc tibi parva ferunt jam nunc solatia dulces;
Dum procul a patriâ raptum, amplexuque tuorum,
Ah dolor! Hispanis sors impia detinet oris,
Henrico cum fratre; patris sic fata tulerunt
Magnanimi, dum fortunâ luctatur iniquâ.
Parce tamen, puer, o lacrymis; fata aspera forsan
Mitescent, aderitque dies lætissima tandem
Post triste exilium patriis cum redditus oris
Lætitiam ingentem populorum, omnesque per urbes
Accipies plausus, et lætas undique voces;
Votaque pro reditu persolvent debita matres.
Interea te Pierides comitentur; in altos
Jam te Parnassi mecum aude attollere lucos.[444]