Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/142

124 with adjectives; while there is yet enough of true feeling to overcome even the wearisomeness of the perpetual laments of the shepherds over the unparalleled cruelty of their innamoratas. Sannazaro had a mistress to whose memory he remained faithful all his life, and most of his fictitious characters veil actual personages. When this is understood, the romance loses its apparent artificiality; and Settembrini's remark is justified, "Anche oggi si sente una dolcezza d'affetto a leggere quel libro." The main literary interest, however, of the Arcadia is that it marks an epoch and carries the reform which Lorenzo de' Medici and Politian had initiated in verse into the domain of prose. It is perhaps the sole Italian prose composition of the fifteenth century which can be said to wear a classic stamp; and being received with enthusiasm and read by all, it fixed a standard which subsequent writers were compelled to maintain. It prescribed the rule for pastoral romance in all languages: not only did Sidney borrow its spirit and many of its episodes as well as its name for his own work, more, however, of a romance and less of a pastoral than Sannazaro's; not only did the two great Portuguese pastoralists, Bernardim Ribeiro and Montemayor, model themselves upon it; but Shakespeare took from it the name of Ophelia, and traces of it may be found, not only in the pastoral part of Keats's Endymion, but even in his Hyperion.

By Sannazaro's time, then, it may be said that Italian literature was fairly despatched on the route which it was to follow throughout the golden Cinque Cento. Elegance, finish, polish were to be the chief aims; form was to be esteemed at least on a par with matter; the mediæval elements, as we find them in Dante, were to