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A most extraordinary effect is produced when it faces the spectator with fan-plumes expanded, reaching so far above its head that they look like a pair of arms thrown up. The most interesting though not the most beautiful of the family is the Gardener bird, discovered a few years ago by the Italian naturalist Beccari. Here is a Bird of Paradise eccentric not in dress but in habits.
The most important, however, of the writers between Casalio and Beccari is the well-known Ferrarese novelist Giovanbattista Giraldi, surnamed Cintio, the author of the Ecatommiti, and of a number of tragedies on the classical model.
Nor is this inconsistent with what he says in the subsequent passage, for it is perfectly true that it was with Beccari that the pastoral first attained its full complexity of dramatic structure, and his allusion to Theocritus means, not that he regarded him as the father of the form, but that, after the manner of a cinquecento critic, he is seeking for authority at least among the ancients where direct precedent is not to be found.
Guarini, who is said to have supplied a prologue for the revival of the piece, bore out Beccari's claim when he wrote in his essay on tragi-comedy: 'First among the moderns to possess the happy boldness to make in this kind, namely the pastoral dramatic tale, of which there is no trace among the ancients, was Agostin de' Beccari, a worthy citizen of Ferrara, to whom alone does the world owe the fair creation of this sort of poem .
In furnishing iron ready for forging, they were simply supplying in a convenient form an article already in use, and for which there was an urgent demand. In the islands to the south we find that many of the pagan tribes do now, or did until recently, mine and smelt the ore. Beccari tells us that the Kayan of Borneo extract iron ore found in their own country.
Like Sannazzaro, Beccari places his shepherds in Arcadia, and invests them with ancient manners; but he goes beyond mere dialogue; he connects their conversations by a series of dramatic actions.
The conscious endeavour after a stable and adequate form appears to me a determining factor in the work of Casalio, Cintio, and finally Beccari.
The Manucodia are the curly Birds of Paradise, and our knowledge of one of the latest and most novel of them is owing not to the indefatigable naturalists who have braved the dangers and discomfort of their wild island home, neither to the English Wallace, the Dutch Von Rosenburg, the Italian Beccari, nor to D'Albertis, nor Bruiju, nor De Myer, whose names will be forever associated with the splendid family, but to a British officer of scientific tastes.
They carry us forward to the point at which the pastoral drama took its shape and being. Of the elements compounded of pastoral idealism and the graceful purity of classical myth, and combining the scenic attractions of the masque with the reasoned action and human interest of the regular drama, the Arcadian pastoral first achieved definite form in the work of Agostino Beccari.
He threw himself on his knees, saying, 'Pardon me, Sire; and, above all, have me searched: He instantly emptied his pockets himself; he pulled off his coat in the greatest agitation and terror: at last he told me that he was cook to , and a friend of Beccari, whom he came to visit; that he had mistaken the staircase, and, finding all the doors open, he had wandered into the room in which I found him, and which he would have instantly left: I rang; Guimard came, and was astonished enough at finding me tete-a-tete with a man in his shirt.
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