of the Count of Colisano, for whose hand he was a suitor[391].  Two shepherds, pilgrims of love, bereft of the objects of their affection, the one through death, the other through inconstancy, meet in a forest and reason of the comparative hardness of their lots.  Unable to decide the question, they each resolve to bear the strongest possible witness to the depth of their affliction by putting an end to their lives.  At this moment, however, the voice of the dead mistress is heard from a neighbouring tree, persuading them to relinquish their intentions, reconciling them once more with the world and life, and directing them to join the festivities in the city of Nola.  Here for the first time we meet with a pastoral composition of some length pretending to a dramatic solution, and contrasting with the stationary character of most of the eclogues we have been examining in that the change of purpose among the actors constitutes a sort of [Greek:  peripe/teia], or rivolgimento.  The piece is likewise important from a metrical point of view, since it not only contains a free intermixture of ottava and terza rima, and hendecasyllables with rimalmezzo, a favourite verse form in certain kinds of composition[392], but likewise foreshadows, in its mingling of freely riming hendecasyllables with settenari, the peculiar measures of the pastoral drama proper. I due pellegrini was not, however, an altogether original composition.  In 1525 had appeared a work by the Neapolitan Marco Antonio Epicuro de’ Marsi, styled in the original edition ‘dialogo di tre ciechi,’ and in later reprints ‘tragi-commedia intitulata Cecaria[393].’  In this three blind men, one blind with love, another with jealousy, the third with gazing too intently on the sun-like beauty of his mistress, meet and determine to die together.  They fall in, however, with a priest of Amor, who sends them back to their respective loves to be cured.  It was this theme that Tansillo arranged in pastoral form, borrowing even the metres of the original, but it was just the element which justifies our including it here that he added, and it is useless to seek in Epicuro’s work the origin of the form with which it was thus only accidentally associated.

A composition of some importance, dating from a period about two years later than Tansillo’s piece, is an ‘ecloga pastorale’ by the ’mestissimo giovane’ Luca di Lorenzo of Siena.[394] Two nymphs, by name Euridice and Diversa, respectively seek and shun the delights of love.  They meet a citto—­that is a bambino in Sienese dialect—­who proves to be none other than Cupid himself, and rewards them according to their deserts, Euridice obtaining the love of the courtly shepherd Orindio, while Diversa is condemned to follow the rude and loveless Fantasia.  The piece is written in a mixture of ottava and terza rima, with a variety of lyrics introduced.  The contrast between the loving and the careless nymphs,