where the poet tells a Christian fable in pagan guise; the antithesis of human and divine love, while suggesting Petrarch’s influence over his life, is a theme that runs throughout medieval philosophy and was later embodied by Spenser in his Hymns.  One poem stands out from the rest somewhat after the manner of Petrarch’s Daphne.  In it Boccaccio tells us, under the thinnest veil of pastoral, how his daughter Violante, dead in childhood many years before, appeared to him bearing tidings of the land beyond the grave.  The theme is the same as that of the almost contemporary Pearl; and in treating it Boccaccio achieves something of the sweetness and pathos of the English poem.  One eclogue, finally, the Valle tenebrosa (Vallis Opaca), which appears to owe something to Dante’s description of hell, is probably historical in its intention, but the gloss explains obscurum per obscurius, and we can only suppose that the author intended that the inner sense should remain a mystery.

When Boccaccio wrote, the eclogue had not yet degenerated into the literary convention it became in the following century; and, though he was no doubt tempted to the use of the form by Vergilian tradition and the example of Petrarch, he must also have followed therein a natural inclination and no mere dictate of fashion.  Even in these poems the humanity of the writer’s personality makes itself felt.  While Laura tends to fade into a personification of poetry, and Petrarch’s strongest convictions find expression through the mouth of St. Peter, we feel that behind Boccaccio’s humanistic exercise lies his own amorous passion, his own religious enthusiasm, his own fatherly tenderness and love.  His eclogues, however, never attained the same reputation as Petrarch’s, and remained in manuscript till the appearance of Giunta’s bucolic collection of 1504.

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As humanism advanced and the golden age of the renaissance approached, Latin bucolic writers sprang up and multiplied.  The fullest collection—­that printed by Oporinus at Basel in March, 1546—­contains the poems of thirty-eight authors, and even this makes no pretence of giving those of the middle ages.  The collection, however, ranges from Calpurnius to Castalio (i.e. the French theologian Sebastien Chateillon), and includes the work of Petrarca, Boccaccio, Spagnuoli, Urceo, Pontano, Sannazzaro, Erasmus, Vida, and others.  There is a strong family likeness in the pastoral verse of these authors, and the majority are devoid of individual interest.  A few, however, merit separate notice.