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but too worthy of repetition; and Tasso was perhaps quite as much ingratiating himself with the learned and the polite in repeating them, as he was unwittingly leading them into a truer taste by the more natural and elder Greek cast of the rest of his poem. With all his epic leanings to Virgil, the Greeks were more in his thoughts when writing pastoral. His biographer Serassi possessed a copy of Theocritus which had belonged to him, and which he had scored over with marks and comments.
It is from Theocritus that our poet took the Flight of Love and the rewards offered by Venus in the Prologue, the comparison of Love with a bee at the beginning of the Second Act, and the complaints of the Satyr in that soliloquy. Minor touches of imitation are also scattered about from Theocritus, Moschus, and Anacreon. The Satyr's
