strike so characteristic a note in the works of the satirical Mantuan, and
seem so out of place in the songs of Spenser and Milton. In one eclogue
the poet mourns over the ruin and desolation of Rome, as a mother deserted
of her children; another is a dialogue between two shepherds, in which St.
Peter, under the pastoral disguise of Pamphilus, upbraids the licentious
Clement VI with the ignoble servitude in which he is content to abide; a
third shows us Clement wantoning with the shameless mistress of a line of
pontifical shepherds, a figure allegorical of the corruption of the
Church[25]; in yet a fourth Petrarch laments his estrangement from his
patron Giovanni Colonna, a cardinal in favour at the papal court, whom it
would appear his outspoken censures had offended. Petrarch's was not the
only voice that was raised urging the Pope to return from the 'Babylonian
captivity,' but the protest had peculiar significance from the mouth of
one who stood forth as the embodiment of the new age still struggling in
the throes of birth. When 'the first Italian' accepted the laurel crown at
the Capitol, he dreamed of Rome as once more the heart of the world, the
city which should embody that early Italian idea of nationality, the ideal
of the humanistic commonwealth. The course urged alike by Petrarch and by
St. Catherine was in the end followed, but the years of exile were yet to
bear their bitterest fruit of mortification and disgrace. In 1377 Gregory
XI transferred the seat of the papacy from Avignon to Rome, with the
resuit that the world was treated to the edifying spectacle of three
prelates each claiming to be the vicar of Christ and sole father of the
Church.

These ecclesiastical eclogues form the most important contribution made by
Italy's greatest lyric poet to pastoral. Others, one in honour of Robert
of Sicily, another recording the defeat of Pan by Articus on the field of
Poitiers, follow already existing pastoral convention. Some few, again, of
less importance in literary history, are of greater personal or poetic