[52] It has been suggested that there is a gradual spiritualization in the motives of the tales; but this would appear to be a somewhat fanciful view.

[53] Proemio, Opere minori, p. 145; Opere volgari, xv. p. 4.

[54] Opere minori, p. 176, Opere volgari, xv. p. 60.

[55] While greatly shortening the passage, and taking considerable liberties in the way of paraphrase, I have endeavoured, as far as possible, to preserve the style and diction of the original.  This will be found in the Opere minori, pp. 213, &c., Opere volgari, xv. pp. 126, &c.

[56] The description of the spring is from Ovid, Metamorphoses, III, 407, &c.  No doubt a great deal more could be traced to Latin sources.

[57] For details concerning tree-lists see Moorman’s William Brown, p. 154.

[58] Dunlop’s notion of the verse being the important part, and the prose only written to connect the varions eclogues, is clearly wrong.  Verse started by being subordinate in Boccaccio’s romance, and remained so in all subsequent examples.

[59] Prosa VIII.  The whole passage was versified in Spanish by Garcilaso, whence a portion found its way into Googe’s eclogues.  Among other ingenions devices Sannazzaro mentions that of pinning down a crow by the extremity of its wings and waiting for it to entangle its fellows in its claws.  If any reader should be tempted to imagine that the author has been drawing on a fertile imagination, let him turn to the adventures of one Morrowbie Jukes, as related by Mr. Rudyard Kipling, for a description of this identical method of crow-catching as practised on the banks of an Indian stream.

[60] It may be well to point out that at times, as in Carino’s invocation to the Dryads, Symonds has infused into his version a beauty of diction of which Sannazzaro appears to be innocent.

[61] The Arcadia must have been extant in its original form as early as 1481, when it served as model for the eclogues of Pietro Jacopo de Jennaro.  The earliest known MS. dates from 1489, and contains the first ten Prose and Ecloghe.  In this form it was surreptitiously printed in 1502; the complete work first appeared in 1504.  The earliest commentary, that of Tommaso Porcacchi, appeared in 1558, and went through several editions.  An elaborate variorum edition was printed at Padua in 1723.  I have followed the text in the ‘Classici italiani.’

[62] Arcadia had been called ‘the mother of flocks’ in the Homeric Hymn to Pan, and Polybius had described the softening effects of music upon its rude inhabitants.  See some interesting remarks on the snbject by J. E. Sandys, in his lectures on the Revival of Learning, Cambridge, 1905; also J. P. Mahaffy, Rambles and Studies, ch. xii.

[63] Having had occasion in the course of the following pages to call attention to certain inaccuracies of Ticknor’s, I should like in this place to record my indebtedness to what still remains the standard history of Spanish literature.  I have likewise made free use of Fitzmaurice-Kelly’s admirable monograph.