characters. It is said not to have reached Bologna till after his death.
These poems were not included in any of the early bucolic collections, and
first appeared in print in the eighteenth century. They seem, from their
purely occasional nature, their inconspicuous bulk, and lack of any
striking characteristics, to have attracted little notice in their own
day, and to have been ignored by later writers on pastoral as forming no
link in the chain of historical development. Given, indeed, the Bucolics
of Vergil, they are imitations such as might at any moment have appeared,
irrespective of date and surroundings, and independent of any living
literary tradition[21]. It is therefore impossible to regard them as in
any way belonging to, or foreshadowing, the great body of renaissance
pastoral, a division of literature endowed with remarkable vitality and
evolutionary force, which must in its growth and decay alike be studied in
close connexion with the ideas and temperament of the age, and in
relation to the general development of the history of letters[22].

The grandeur of the Roman Empire, the background against which in
historical retrospect we see the bucolic eclogues of Vergil and his
immediate followers, had vanished when Italian literature once more rose
out of chaos. The political organism had resolved itself into its
constituent elements, and fresh combinations had arisen. Nevertheless,
though the Empire was hardly now the shadow of its pristine greatness, men
still looked to Rome as the centre of the civilized world. As the seat of
the Church, it stood for the one force capable of supplying a permanent
element among the warring interests of European politics. Nothing was more
natural than that the poetic form that had reflected the glories of
imperial Rome should bow to the fascination of Rome, the visible emblem on
earth of the spiritual empire of Christ. To the medieval mind, so far from
there being any antagonism between the two ideas, the one seemed almost to
involve and necessitate the other. It saw in the splendeur of the Empire