at San Cipriano, but he soon returned to Naples, where he fell in love
with Carmosina Bonifacia. His passion does not appear to have been
reciprocated, but the lady has her place in literature as the Phillis of
the eclogues. He attached himself to the court of Frederick of Aragon,
whom he followed into exile in France. Returning to Naples after his
patron's death in 1503, he again fell in love, this time with a certain
Cassandra Marchesa, to whom he continued to pay court, _more Platonico_,
till his death in 1530. He is said to have died at her house.

To his Italian work I shall have to return later; here it is his five
Latin piscatory eclogues that demand notice. There is nothing in the
subject-matter to arrest attention--they consist of a lament for
Carmosina, a lover's complaint, a singing match, a panegyric, and a poem
in honour of Cassandra--but the form is interesting. Of course the claim
sometimes put forward for Sannazzaro, as the inventor of the piscatory
eclogue, ignores various passages in Theocritus, notably the twenty-first
Idyl, whence he presumably borrowed the idea. But it is certainly
refreshing, after wandering in an unreal Sicily and an imaginary Arcadia,
and listening to shepherds discourse of the abuses of the Roman Curia, to
dive into the waters of the bay of Naples, or wanton in fancy along its
sunlit shore from the low rocks of Baiae to the sheer cliffs of Sorrento,
and to feel that, even though Jacopo was no Neapolitan fisher-boy, and
Carmosina no nymph of Posilipo, yet the poet had at least before him the
blue water and the dark rocks, and in his heart the love that formed the
theme of his song[31].

Sannazzaro also wrote a mythological poem entitled _Salices_, in which
certain nymphs pursued by satyrs are changed by Diana into willows. The
tale was evidently suggested by Ovid, and cannot strictly be classed as
pastoral, though it may have helped to fix in pastoral convention the