[175] Aminta, I. i; Canace, IV. ii.

[176] Lettere del Guarini, Veneta, Ciotti, 1615, p. 92.  See Rossi, 56^{1}

[177] I have already had occasion to point out that, from the time of Boccaccio onwards, a nymph of Diana might represent a nun, but the whole of Silvia’s relations with Dafne make it plain that she is in no way vowed to virginity.  Her being represented as a follower of Diana implies no more than that she is fancy-free, and so in a sense under the protection of the virgin goddess.  This use of the phrase is as old as Theocritus:  ’Artemis, be not wrathful, thy votary breaks her vow’ (Idyl 27).  And it is so used by Silvia herself in her proud and petulant retort to Aminta:  ’Pastor, non mi toccar; son di Diana’ (III. i).

[178] The idea passed from Italian into English verse: 

            tell me why
  This goblin ‘honour,’ by the world enshrined,
  Should make men atheists, and not women kind—­

to improve upon the exceedingly neat bowdlerization which the Rev. J. W. Ebsworth has sought to palm off as the genuine text of Tom Carew.

[179] We have, in the passages quoted, a foretaste of the priggish extravagance of the Faithful Shepherdess.  That there should have been found critics to combine just but wholly otiose condemnation of Cloe with reverential appreciation of the absurdities of Clorin and Thenot, and to clap applause to the self-conscious virtue, little removed from smugness, in which the ‘moral grandeur’ of the Lady of the Ludlow masque is clothed, is indeed a striking witness to the tyranny of conventional morality.  If virginal purity were in fact the hypocritical convention which it is to some extent possible to condone in the Aminta, but which becomes wholly loathsome in the work of Fletcher, the sooner it disappeared from the region of practical ethics the better for the moral health of humanity.

[180] Menagio’s edition is said to have appeared in 1650, but I have only seen the edition of 1655, which I also notice is the date given by Weise and Percopo (p. 319).  The play is said to have been printed in Italy alone some two hundred times; there are twenty French translations, five German, at least nine English, several in Spanish and other languages.  A version in the Slavonic Illyrian dialect appeared in 1598; a Latin one in iambic trimeters by Andrea Hiltebrando, a Pomeranian physician, in 1615; another in modern Greek in 1745.  See Carducci, p. 99.

[181] Published, together with Paglia’s reply, by Antonio Bulifon in his Lettere memorabili, Naples, 1698, iii. p. 307.  The play had already been adversely criticized by Francesco Patrizi and Gian Vincenzo Gravina.

[182] ‘L’Aminta difeso e illustrato da G. Fontanini,’ Roma, 1700.  Another edition appeared in 1730 at Venice, with further annotations by Uberto Benvoglienti.

[183] It is, however, perfectly true that the play, together with the writings in its defence and the notes, to be considered later, occupied the attention of the author for a period of fully twenty years, and it is possibly thus that the tradition arose.  I may say that throughout this section I am under deep obligations to Rossi’s monograph.