the Arcadia is a work of which extracts are apt to give a somewhat too favourable impression.  In its long complaints, speeches, and descriptions it is at whiles intolerably prolix and dull, but it caught the taste of the age and went through a large number of editions, many with learned annotations, between the appearance of the first authorized edition and the end of the sixteenth century[61], There were several imitations later, such as the Accademia tusculana of Benedetto Menzini; Firenzuola imitated the third Prosa in his Sacrifizio pastorale; while collections of tales and facetiae such as the Arcadia in Brenta of Giovanni Sagredo equally sought the prestige of the name.  A French translation published in 1544 went through three editions, and another appeared in 1737, while it was translated into Spanish in 1547, and again in 1578.  It may have been due to the existence of Sidney’s more ambitious work of the same name that no translation ever appeared in English.

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Our survey of Italian pastoralism, in spite of the fact that its most important manifestation has been reserved for separate treatment later, has of necessity been lengthy.  It was at Italian breasts that the infant ideal, reborn into a tumultuous world, was nursed.  The other countries of continental Europe borrowed that ideal from Italy, though each in turn contributed characteristics of its own.  It was to Italy that England too was directly indebted, while at the same time it absorbed elements peculiar to France and Spain.  It will therefore be necessary briefly to review the forms that flourished in those countries respectively, though they need detain us but a brief space in comparison with the Italian fountain-head.

Before proceeding, however, it may be worth while to pause for a moment in order to take a general survey of the nature of the ideal, we might almost say the religion, of pastoralism, which reached its maturity in the work of Sannazzaro.  Its location in the uplands of Arcadia may be traced to Vergil, who had the worship of Pan in mind, but the selection of the barren mountain district of central Peloponnesus as the seat of pastoral luxuriance and primitive culture is not without significance in respect of the severance of the pastoral ideal from actuality.[62] In it the world-weary age of the later renaissance sought escape from the materialism that bound it.  Italy had turned its back upon mysticism in religion, and upon chivalry in love; its literature was the negation of what the northern peoples understand by romance.  Yet it needed some relief from the very saneness of its rationalism, and it found the antidote to its vicious court life in the crystal springs of Castaly.  What the pietism of Perugino’s saints is to the feuds of the Baglioni, such is the Arcadian dream to the intellectual cynicism of Italian politics.