strike so characteristic a note in the works of the satirical Mantuan, and seem so out of place in the songs of Spenser and Milton.  In one eclogue the poet mourns over the ruin and desolation of Rome, as a mother deserted of her children; another is a dialogue between two shepherds, in which St. Peter, under the pastoral disguise of Pamphilus, upbraids the licentious Clement VI with the ignoble servitude in which he is content to abide; a third shows us Clement wantoning with the shameless mistress of a line of pontifical shepherds, a figure allegorical of the corruption of the Church[25]; in yet a fourth Petrarch laments his estrangement from his patron Giovanni Colonna, a cardinal in favour at the papal court, whom it would appear his outspoken censures had offended.  Petrarch’s was not the only voice that was raised urging the Pope to return from the ’Babylonian captivity,’ but the protest had peculiar significance from the mouth of one who stood forth as the embodiment of the new age still struggling in the throes of birth.  When ‘the first Italian’ accepted the laurel crown at the Capitol, he dreamed of Rome as once more the heart of the world, the city which should embody that early Italian idea of nationality, the ideal of the humanistic commonwealth.  The course urged alike by Petrarch and by St. Catherine was in the end followed, but the years of exile were yet to bear their bitterest fruit of mortification and disgrace.  In 1377 Gregory XI transferred the seat of the papacy from Avignon to Rome, with the resuit that the world was treated to the edifying spectacle of three prelates each claiming to be the vicar of Christ and sole father of the Church.

These ecclesiastical eclogues form the most important contribution made by Italy’s greatest lyric poet to pastoral.  Others, one in honour of Robert of Sicily, another recording the defeat of Pan by Articus on the field of Poitiers, follow already existing pastoral convention.  Some few, again, of less importance in literary history, are of greater personal or poetic interest.  In one we see Francesco and his brother Gherardo wandering in the realm of shepherds, and there exchanging their views concerning religious verse.  A group of three, standing apart from the rest, connect themselves with the subject of the Canzoniere.  The first describes the ravages of the plague at Avignon; the second mourns over the death of poetry in the person of Laura, who fell a victim on April 6, 1348; the third is a dirge sung by the shepherdesses over her grave.  One, lastly, a neo-classic companion to Theocritus’ tale of Galatea, recounts the poet’s unrequited homage to Daphne of the Laurels, thus again suggesting the idealized source of Petrarch’s inspiration.  This poem is not only the gem of the series, but embodies the mythopoeic spirit of classical imagination in a manner unknown in the later days of the renaissance.