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In the meanwhile he detains Mopso with an account of his love for a nymph he met the day before, and sings a canzona: The boy Tirsi now returns, having with much trouble driven the strayed calf back to the herd, and narrates how he saw an unknown nymph of wondrous beauty gathering flowers about the hill.
In the Ferrarese revision these stanzas appear as 'Argomento' without mention of Mercury, while for the above lines are substituted the astonishing doggerel: Or stia ciascuno a tutti gli atti intento, Che cinque sono; e questo è l' argomento. Mopso asks whether his white calf has been seen, and Aristeo, who fancies he has heard a lowing from beyond the hill, sends his boy to see.
It is contrasted with the usual pastoral denunciation of court and city put into the mouth of the pretended augur Mopso. In this character it has been customary to see Sperone Speroni, who later accused Tasso of plagiarizing him in the Gerusalemme, and was the first to apply the ominous word 'madman' to the unfortunate poet.
Aristeo recognizes from this description the object of his love, and, leaving Mopso and Tirsi to shake their heads over his midsummer madness, goes off to find her. So far we might be reading one of the ecloghe rappresentative which we shall have to consider shortly, but of which the earliest known examples cannot well be less than ten or twelve years later than Poliziano's play.
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