that pervades many of the themes, the orthodox eclogue on conversion
standing in curious contrast with that on ecclesiastical abuses.

It is not easy to account for Spagnuoli's popularity, but the curiously
representative quality of his work was no doubt in part the cause. His
poems were what, through the changing fashions of centuries, men had come
to expect of bucolic verse. They crystallized into a standard mould
whatever in pastoral, whether classical or renaissance, was most obviously
and easily reducible to a type, and so attained the position of models
beyond which it was needless to go. They were first printed in 1498, and
went through a number of editions during the author's lifetime. As a young
man--and it is to his earlier years that the bulk of the eclogues must be
attributed--Spagnuoli was noted for the elegance of his Latin verse; but
his facility led him into over-production, and Tiraboschi reports his
later writings as absolutely unreadable. He was of Spanish extraction, as
his name implies, became a Carmelite, and rose to be general of the order,
but retired in 1515, the year before his death.

Three eclogues are extant from the pen of Pontano, a distinguished
humanist at the court of Ferdinand I and his successors at Naples, and a
Latin poet of considerable grace and feeling. His poems were first
published by Aldus in 1505, two years after his death. In one
characteristic composition he laments the loss of his wife, to whom he was
deeply attached; another introduces under a pastoral name his greater
disciple Sannazzaro[30].

Jacopo Sannazzaro, known to humanism as Actius Sincerus, disciple of the
'Accademia Pontana,' and editor of his master's works, the greatest
explorer, if not the greatest exponent, of the mysteries of Arcadia, was
born of parents of Spanish origin at Naples in 1458. His boyhood was spent