The eighth is prefaced by an address to Pollio1, who is also mentioned in the third Eclogue as the poet's patron, while the ninth, as we have said, contains a direct appeal to Varus. This Eclogue, together with the first, is almost wholly occupied with Virgil's private affairs; the fifth almost certainly describes the deification of Julius Caesar under the guise of pastoral allegory. Only the second and seventh Eclogues remain as pure pastorals, without any contemporary allusions 2; the prevalence of such allusions elsewhere marks, as will presently appear, the beginning of a new phase in the history of bucolic poetry 3.

Whatever may be the result of speculations as to the remoter origins of the Pastoral, the Sicilian Theocritus was certainly the first who developed it as a distinct species of literature. Born at Syracuse, educated probably under Philetas in the isle of Cos, he took with him recollections of his native Sicily to the court of Ptolemy at Alexandria, where an artificial and refined mode of living made the representation of rural scenes charming by way of contrast. His Idyllia, or 'little pictures,' are for the most part drawn from nature; presenting in a partly dramatic, partly narrative form the manners of Sicilian swains, singing of their flocks and herds, their rustic loves, the joys and occasional sorrows of simple country life. Much indeed of the colouring and ornament in these Idylls is due to the artistic requirements of a literary age, but the foundation is real,

1 See Introduction to the eighth Eclogue.

2 Unless the Codrus mentioned in E. 7. 22 represents a poet of the day, but this is doubtful.

3 For a fuller account of the rise and progress of pastoral poetry see Introduction to my edition of Milton's Lycidas (Longmans, 1874). + Ancient traditions differ as to the precise date, but agree in referring the origin of pastoral poetry to rustic festivals of Artemis in Greece or Sicily, which gave rise to a regular custom of singing for prizes of loaves and skins full of wine in rude bucolic fashion. In course of time these contests of song would attract the notice of professional poets, and cause them to adopt a similar mode of expression. Thus a distinct school of bucolic poetry arose in Sicily.

and the songs and dialogues, in which rustic, sometimes coarse banter alternates with the utmost delicacy and refinement, are such as Theocritus must often have heard in his native land. How much in the Idylls is to be taken as literal fact we cannot now determine, but before very long pastoral poetry began to lose something of its primitive simplicity. The real and the dramatic characters became confused, the shepherd was identified with the poet, and pastoral names like Lycidas, Menalcas and the rest were understood to represent by a sort of allegory the author himself and his friends, or his rivals. Theocritus indeed is nearly free from this confusion; only in his seventh Idyll does he mention his instructors, Asclepiades and Philetas, by name, to whom, in the character of Simichidas, he professes himself inferior. But in the third Idyll of Moschus the poet's personality is but thinly disguised; for in his lament over his deceased master Bion he compares him in express terms with Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar, and even with Theocritus himself, representing him at the same time as a shepherd piping to his flocks and milking his goats in the plains and pastures of Sicily. Passing through the two intervening centuries, during which the history of pastoral poetry is almost a blank, to the Eclogues of Virgil, we find the transition complete. The 'pastoral' has now become little more than a particular mode of expression, a form in which the poem, whatever its subject, is conventionally cast, while the terms 'Sicilian,' 'Syracusan,' or 'Arcadian' are recognised as distinctive literary epithets of bucolic song1. The confusion is increased by the application of Greek pastoral to the circumstances of Italian life and the transference of Sicilian scenery to the environs of Mantua. The names of Virgil's shepherds are Greek, and the incidents of their lives, their sentiments, nay their very words, are minutely reproduced from those of the Theocritean swains; nevertheless they talk with one 1 Cp. Virg. Ecl. iv. 1, vi. 1, vii. 4 and notes.

ES

another as natives of Italy, Tityrus descanting to Meliboeus on the magnificence of Rome, while in the third Eclogue Damoetas and Menalcas contend together for the favour of Pollio, and in the ninth Menalcas appeals to Varus to protect his homestead from the intrusion of Roman marauders. Again, the fourth Eclogue invokes Sicilian Muses to celebrate the glories of Pollio's consulship; in the sixth the Aonian sisterhood receive Gallus into their company, and present him with the pastoral pipe of Hesiod by the hands of the legendary Linus. Such a mixture of associations was sure to occur, when once the pastoral had lost its original simplicity and become a recognised vehicle of poetic utterance.

Speaking of Virgil as an imitator of Theocritus, the late Professor Conington, in his Introduction to the Bucolics, bids us 'follow him line by line, and observe how constantly he is thinking of his guide, even where a simple reliance on nature would have been far more easy and obvious; on many occasions deviating from the passage before him, only to cast a glance on some other part of his model.' Most of the Eclogues amply confirm this statement; the third is a conspicuous example. The mutual recriminations of Damoetas and Menalcas are copied from the fourth and fifth Idylls; the proposal of a wager is partly from the eighth, partly from the first Idyll, which also supplies the description of the cups offered as a prize. For the choice of an umpire and three of the competing couplets Virgil is again indebted to the fifth Idyll; another couplet is taken from the third, another from the eighth, and three more from the fifth and fourth respectively. Besides these instances of direct imitation, many turns of expression and incidental allusions are due to various passages in Theocritus, whose poems Virgil must have known almost by heart. Yet he never mentions his name, any more than he does that of Hesiod in the Georgics, but speaks only in general terms of 'Syracusan verse,'' Sicilian Muses,' and 'Ascraean song'1. It is never

1 4

Ascraeumque cano Romana per oppida carmen' G. ii. 176.

theless the fact that Virgil regarded himself and was accepted by his contemporaries as an original poet. In the sixth Eclogue he boasts of having been the first to introduce pastoral poetry at Rome, while here, as elsewhere, he distinctly acknowledges his obligations to the Sicilian Muses that inspired Theocritus. To a Roman the literature of Greece was the supreme and only model of excellence; hence he who best succeeded in reproducing the ideas, language, and metre of a Greek writer was deemed worthy of the highest praise for originality, where a modern author might justly incur the charge of plagiarism. Yet Virgil is no vulgar copyist; often, it is true, he falls below his model and occasionally misapprehends him1; he is inferior to Theocritus in variety of characters, precision of scenery, consistency of treatment, everything in short that constitutes dramatic power; yet his Eclogues have abundant charms of their own. In the arts of refinement and elegance, delicacy of feeling, most of all in his perfect grace of expression attuned to the rich music of melodious verse, Virgil is admittedly without a rival. So irresistible is his influence, as to make us forget or even condone all defects and incongruities, and it is Virgil, rather than Theocritus, that modern pastoral poets have taken as their model for imitation.

It may perhaps appear strange that the Romans, claiming as they did descent from a pastoral ancestry and nursed as they were by a regular recurrence of festivals in pastoral recollections, should afterwards have paid little regard to the cultivation of bucolic poetry; yet the later poets, such as Calpurnius and Nemesianus, occupy but a low place among the post-augustan writers 2. Their poetry is at best an imitation of well-known passages in Virgil's Eclogues; and though it preserves all the unreality of the Virgilian pastoral, it has little of the master's grace and elegance by way of compensation. Other names of even less note need not here

1 See notes on Ecl. vi. 16, viii. 59.

2 See specimens quoted in Appendix.

be recorded; an Eclogue by the Venerable Bede (about 700 A.D.) entitled Cuculus, a contest in verse between Winter and Spring concerning the appearance of the cuckoo, deserves a passing notice.

The earliest modern pastorals are the French pastourelles, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries A. D., which were love dialogues in verse spoken alternately. Twelve Latin Eclogues by Petrarch appeared in 1350, and others by Mantuan in 1402; these last were much admired and taught in schools more than a century later. Portuguese and Spanish pastoral romances were produced about the same time, or even earlier, but the Italians, whose language was better known, made this kind of composition fashionable in Europe1. Hence the fashion passed into England; the earliest English pastorals being Barclay's Eclogues (1514) modelled upon Petrarch and Mantuan. During the reign of Elizabeth the rage for pastoral was at its height; this was principally owing to the numerous translations of the Greek and Latin Classics produced at this time. With the pagan and Italian fictions Gothic romance was incorporated, and the refined language of courtiers and feudal knights was adopted, most incongruously, by characters in the guise of plain shepherds. Spenser in his Shepheard's Calendar (1579) attempted to restore to the pastoral something of its original rusticity, but with only partial success; for the uncouth language of his swains (unlike the native Doric of Theocritus) is unnatural, and to modern ears often repulsive. Early in the seventeenth century appeared Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, Browne's Britannia's Pastorals, and the Sad Shepherd of Jonson. In 1634 Milton, by his masques of Arcades and Comus, made an effort toward purifying the pastoral drama from the licentiousness by which many of its specimens had been dis

1 Sannazaro's Arcadia appeared in 1502, his Latin Piscatory Eclogues in 1520. The first complete pastoral drama is Beccari's Il Sagrifizio (1554). Tasso's Aminta and Guarini's Pastor Fido are dated 1580 and 1585 respectively.