Every reader of Wyatt's poems will, I am sure, have no difficulty in recalling the epigram, In dowtfull brest…, which he himself furnished with the caption: ‘Of the mother that eat her childe at the siege of Jerusalem’. I quote from the Egerton manuscript version as given by Kenneth Muir, the latest editor of his verse, in Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), p. 61.

In dowtfull brest, whilst moderly pitie
With furyous famyn stondith at debate,
Sayth thebrew moder: O child vnhappye,
Retorne thi blowd where thow hadst milk of late.
Yeld me those lymns that I made unto thi,
And entre there where thou wert generate,
For of on body agaynst all nature
to a nothr must I mak sepulture.

Of all the forms of Latin hexameter verse cultivated during the European Renaissance none, perhaps, had so long and so vigorous a history as the bucolic eclogue or pastoral. From early in the fourteenth century to late in the eighteenth there was a constant stream of pastoral verse, some of it written by triflers, some by many of Europe's foremost poets: it is enough to mention Milton's Epitaphium Damonis. Most such poems were literary and derivative, some were attempts to develop a new class of pastoral, some were attempts to put the pastoral form to entirely new uses.

A common variety of eclogue in Renaissance Latin literature is the pastoral lament on the death of a friend or patron. We may instance that of Marco Girolamo Vida (1485-1566) on Pope Julius II (d. 1513), that of Cinzio Giambattista Giraldi (1504-73) on Ludovicus Bonactiolus and Joannes Manardus (both doctors who had taught the poet), that of Giano Anisio (ca. 1475-ca. 1540) on Giovanni Pontano (1422?-1503) of Naples, or Pontano's on his wife Adriana Sassone (d. 1491).

In 1413 King Ladislaus of Naples captured Rome, forcing Antipope John xxiii (1410-15) to flee to Florence. Gregorovius describes the sack of the Eternal City on this occasion as follows:

The secular poetry of Philippe Desportes (1546-1606) is most often characterized as précieux. One may wish to distinguish between préciosité as an historical phenomenon and précieux as a recurring literary tendency, and one may quarrel about the exact definition of the term, but when examples are needed none are any better than those chosen from the works of Desportes. This no one would deny, but when the extreme view is taken that Desportes is nothing but an insincere and clever versifier who crassly imitates Italian models and hawks his wares to the highest bidder, then one must protest.