In the meantime Silvio has been successful in his hunting of the boar, whose head he brings home in triumph.  There follows an echo-scene, one of those toys which, as old as the Greek Anthology, and cultivated in Latin by Tebaldeo, and in Italian by Poliziano, owed, not indeed their introduction, but certainly their great popularity in pastoral, to Guarini.  His example is fairly successful.  The echo predicts that the end of Silvio’s ‘carelessness’ is at hand, when he shall himself break his bow and follow her who now follows him.  The prophecy is quick of fulfilment.  With a jest he turns to go, when his eye falls on a grey object crouching among the bushes.  He supposes it to be a wolf, and looses an arrow at it.  It proves, however, to be Dorinda, who has throughout followed his chase disguised in the rough wolf-skin coat of a herdsman, and who is now led fainting on to the scene by Lupino.  Silvio is overcome with remorse, and, careless alike of his troth to Amarilli and of the fate of Arcadia, declares that thenceforth he will love none but Dorinda, and will die with her should his arrow prove fatal.  They leave the stage for good—­to get healed and married.

To return to the main plot.  At sundown Mirtillo is led out to die, and the sacrifice is about to be performed when his supposed father, an Arcadian by birth, though he has long lived at Elis, and has just arrived in search of his foster child, interposes.  Explanations ensue, and it gradually appears that Mirtillo is the eldest son of Montano, washed away in his cradle by the floods of the Alpheus twenty years before.  Thus in the love between him and Amarilli, and in his voluntary sacrifice of himself in her place, the oracle is fulfilled, and Arcadia freed from its maiden tribute.  This seems obvious enough, though it takes the inspiration of a blind prophet to drive it into the heads of the assembled Arcadians.  A final difficulty remains—­the broken troth.  But it so happens that Mirtillo was originally named Silvio, so that to ‘Silvio’ no faith is broken.  A casuistical reason indeed; but good enough for the purpose.  No attempt is made to clear Amarilli of the compromising evidence on which she had been condemned, but the pair have the favour of the gods, and the chorus makes no difficulty of chanting the virtue of the bride.

Such is Guarini’s play; a plot constructed with consummate ingenuity, but presented with an almost entire lack of dramatic feeling.  Almost the whole of the action takes place off the stage.  Silvio and Dorinda leave the scene apparently for a tragic catastrophe; their subsequent union is only reported; so is the surprisal of Mirtillo and Amarilli, the scene in which the former offers himself as a sacrifice in her place, and their meeting after the cloud of death has passed.  The solitary scene revealing any real dramatic power is that between Amarilli and the priest Nicandro, in which the girl maintains her innocence.  Her terror when confronted with death