e the power behind the throne to advise me on whom
to shower my benefits."

Lucrezia clapped her hands softly. "Bravo, dear Uncle, I have guessed
this ambition, have I not? Cardinal de' Medici is already spoken of as
the Pope's successor. But the Medici balls have been carved too often
over St. Peter's chair, and you are minded to blazon in their place the
d'Este eagle. You need not answer for I know that I am right."

The Cardinal smiled mysteriously. "Too shrewd, my niece, too shrewd by
half. How your woman's intuition leaps over intervening obstacles. Never
a whisper of this guess at my aims. Remember, it is but your own surmise
and that I have never breathed such an aspiration. The immediate object
of my solicitude is to secure a charming play worthy of the setting of
Villa d'Este breathing the spirit of Ovid and Anacreon, one which will
make the old Greek gods live again in these delicious haunts and will
redound to the reputation of your uncle's taste in literature."

"How magnanimous you are," cried Leonora, "to disclaim your principal
motive, that of helping Tasso! He shall come, and he will give you the
most beautiful idyl that was ever written."

* * *

And who shall say that Tasso did not make good the promise of his
patroness? In the _Amyntas_ we have the development of a theme which is
the inevitable product of such a temperament in such a situation, and to
the poem itself we will now look for a record of what transpired at
Villa d'Este during the writing and the presentation of the pastoral.

To us it is true that the archaic quality, the pseudo-classicism of this
pastoral seems at first artificial. "It has only so much of rustic
nature as suits a graceful urban fancy." Arcadia is a no man's land, so
far from our desires that we cannot picture it even in imagination; but
to one who knows how sincere was the enthusiasm of the Renaissance for
Greek ideals as well as for modes of expression, how classicism had come
to be understood as a synonym for perfection in form whether in
literature or the plastic arts,--all the pretty imagery of the Golden
Age and its demigods becomes as natural a poetic rendering of sincere
feeling as the equally formal restrictions of the measure of the sonnet
or the rules which govern the composition of a concerto. Having once
learned its technique genius and passion were unconscious of their
limitations, but flowed with as true and spontaneous an impulse within
these formal b