sm and the final appearance of a dramatic
form equipped with the most potent charms of sensuous art. It was in
such a period that a special kind of public was developed. The
"Cortegiano" of Castiglione, Bembo's "Asolani," the "Camaldolese
Discourses" of Landino could have been addressed only to social
oligarchies standing on a basis of polite culture.

In such conditions the stern ideals of early Christianity were thrust
into obscurity and the sensuous charms of a hybrid paganism, a bastard
child of ancient Greece and medieval Italy herself, excited the desires
of scholars and dilettanti from the lagoons of Venice to the Bay of
Naples. In the midst of this era it is not remarkable that we hear the
pipe of Pan, slightly out of tune and somewhat clogged by artifice, as
it was later in the day of Rousseau, but none the less playing the
ancient hymns to Nature and the open air life.

Jacopo Sannazzaro (1458-1530) embodied the ideals of the time in his
"Arcadia," in which Symonds finds the literary counterparts of the
frescoes of Gozzo and Lippo Lippi. At any rate the poem contains the
whole apparatus of nymphs and satyrs transplanted to Italian landscape
and living a life of commingled Hellenism and Italianism. The eloquence
of Sannazzaro is that of the Arcadian the world over. He sighs and weeps
and calls upon dryads, hamadryads and oreads to pity his consuming
passion. When he sees his mistress she is walking in the midst of
pastoral scenes where satyrs lurk behind every bush and the song of the
shepherd is heard in the land. Sannazzaro's "Arcadia" was the
inspiration of Sir Philip Sidney's. It was a natural outburst of the
time and it conveys perfectly the spirit of Italian imaginative thought
in a period almost baffling in the complexity of its character.

It was not strange that in such a time Italian poets should have
discerned in Orpheus the embodiment of their own ideals. There is no
evidence that the Italians of the fifteenth century knew (or at any rate
considered) the true meaning of the Orpheus myth. Of its relation to the
Sun myth and of Euridice as the dawn they give no hint. To them Orpheus
was the embodiment of the Arcadian idea. He was the singer of the hymns
that woke all nature to life. For him the satyr capered and the coy
nymph came bridling from her retreat, the woods became choral and the
streams danced in the sunlight to the magic of his pipe. This was the
poetic phase of the general trend of human