But Leigh Hunt confesses its superiority in "true dramatic skill, and flesh and blood interest": it is indeed as far as anything can be from the insipidity usually associated with pastoral compositions. It has, moreover, more of the genuine yearning for the golden age, the spirit which inspires Keats's Endymion, than is found in the fanciful dramas of Fletcher, or Milton, or Ben Jonson, "The central motive of Aminta and the Pastor Fido," says Symonds, "is the contrast between the actual world of ambition, treachery, and sordid strife, and the ideal world of pleasure, loyalty, and tranquil ease."
Although the pastoral drama is a legitimate as well as a beautiful kind of composition, it is not capable of very great extension or variety. Tasso's successors might conceivably surpass him as poefs, but could only repeat him as dramatists. His only serious competitor is his contemporary Giovanni Battista Guarini, the author of the Pastor Fido (1537–1612).
Guarini, the descendant of a Veronese family already distinguished in letters, was, like Tasso, attached to the court of the Duke of Ferfara; but, unlike Tasso, was a man of the world, and was employed in several important missions, especially one to solicit the crown of Poland for his master, where he nearly died of a Polish inn. Like most of the Duke's literary protégés, he became estranged from him, and spent the later part of his life in roaming from court to court in quest of employment, and litigating with his children and the world at large. His disposition was quarrelsome; literary disputes had long severed him from Tasso; it is to his honour that when the latter was unable to watch over his own works, he took care of and published his lyrical poems. The
