Apart from the dramatic or semi-dramatic work we have been reviewing, the pastoral verse which possesses the most natural and national character, though it may not be the earliest in date, is to be found in the poems of Francisco de Sa de Miranda[67].  He appears to have begun writing independently of the Italian school, and, even after he came under the influence of Garcilaso, to have preserved much of his natural simplicity and genuineness of feeling.  He probably had some direct knowledge of the Italians, for he writes: 

    Liamos....
    .... os pastores italianos
    Do bom velho Sanazarro.

He may also have been influenced by Encina, most of whose work had already appeared.

The first and foremost of those who deliberately based their style on the Italian was Garcilaso de la Vega, whose pastoral work dates from about 1526.  To him, in conjunction with Boscan and Mendoza, the vogue was due.  At his best, when he really assimilates the foreign elements borrowed from his models and makes their style his own, he writes with the true genius of his nation.  The first of his three eclogues, which was probably composed at Naples and is regarded as his best work, introduces the shepherds Salico and Nemoroso, of whom the first stands for the author, while in the other it is not hard to recognize his friend Boscan.  This poem, a portion of which is translated by Ticknor, should of itself suffice to place Garcilaso in the front rank of pastoral writers.  Yet he does not appear to occupy any isolated eminence among his fellows, and Ticknor may be right in thinking that, throughout, the regular pastoral showed fewer of its defects in Spain than elsewhere.  It is also true that it appears to have been endowed with less vital power of development.

Garcilaso’s followers were numerous.  Among them mention may be made of Francisco de Figueroa, the Tirsi of Cervantes’ Galatea; Pedro de Encinas, who attempted religious eclogues; Lope de Vega; Alonso de Ulloa, the Venetian printer, who is credited with having foisted the Rodrigo episode into Montemayor’s Diana; Gaspar Gil Polo, one of the continuators of that work; and Bernardo de Balbuenas, one of its many imitators, who incorporated in his Siglo de Oro a number of eclogues which in their simple and rustic nature appear to be studied from Theocritus rather than Vergil.

In spite of the fashion of writing in Castilian which prevailed among Portuguese poets, we are not without specimens of pastoral verse composed in the less important dialect.  Sa de Miranda has been mentioned above.  Ribeiro too, better known for his romance, left a series of five autobiographical eclogues[68] dating from about 1516-24, and consequently earlier than Garcilaso’s.  They are composed, like some of Sa de Miranda’s, in the short measures more natural to the language than the terza rima and intricate stanzas of the Italianizing poets.  Later on Camoens wrote fifteen eclogues, four of which are piscatorial, and in one, a dialogue between a shepherd and a fisherman, refers in the following terms to Sannazzaro: