THEOCRITUS AND ENGLISH POETS 119 



the stock in trade of the Bucoliastae in Cos, Sicily, and Magna 

 Graecia.i 



The influence of Theocritus on fishing literature in mime, 

 epigram, or romance is writ large in the pages not only of 

 Moschus, Leonidas of Tarentum, Alciphron, Plautus, Ovid, 

 but also of Sannazaro in the fifteenth, of our Spenser 2 and his 

 followers in the sixteenth and subsequent centuries, and even 

 of Keats. 3 



This influence shows most widely in the more abundant 



* This name was applied, according to Athenasus, XIV. lo, from the 

 peculiar poetry made by those who kept cattle. 



» The Faerie Queen, especially Books I„ II., III. Of the other writers, I 

 simply cite (A) Piscatorie Eclogs, 1633, and in a lesser degree Sicelides, 1631, 

 of Phineas Fletcher, perhaps the most conspicuous writer of fisher Idylls in 

 English, whom Izaak Walton terms " an excellent divine, and an excellent 

 angler, and author of excellent Piscatory Eclogues " ; (B) Nereides or Sea 

 Eclogues (of which only one is strictly a fisher eclogue) published anonymously 

 in 1712, but to be followed the next year by Dryades, by Diaper (translator 

 with his fellow Fellow of Balliol of Oppian's Halieutica), which Swift com- 

 mends to Stella as the earliest book of its kind in English, a statement which 

 has been ampUfied into " the only book of its kind in any literature," for his 

 Muse dives to a new Arcadia set in the coral groves of the deep sea, and thence 

 evokes the characters of his Eclogues — " mermen and nereids who behave 

 exactly like the personages in Virgil and in Sannazaro " ; (C) William 

 Browne, Britannia's Pastorals (1613-1616), in which fishing, although but 

 incidentally introduced, is well and truly described, notably the passage in 

 Book I., Song 5, about the capture of the pike ; (D) Moses Browne (who 

 endeavoured to show that Angling comes fairly within the range of the 

 Pastoral), the author of the most popular of all English fishing idylls. Angling 

 Sports in Nine Piscatory Eclogues, 1729; (E) William Thompson's Hymn to 

 May (1758); (F) John Gay, whose Rural Sports (1713) is, however, more of 

 an angling georgic than a piscatory eclogue. 



The eclogue, piscatory or other, was severely criticised by Dryden, who 

 complaining of its affectation that shepherds had always to be in love, roundly 

 stated, " This Phylissing comes from Italy " ; by Pope, who found fault with 

 Theocritus because of his introduction of " fishers and harvesters " ; by 

 Dr. Johnson, whose denunciation (in his essay, The Reason why Pastorals 

 Delight) of Sannazaro for his introduction into the eclogue of the sea, which 

 by presenting much less variety than the land must soon exhaust the pos- 

 sibilities of marine imagery, and known only to a few must always remain to 

 the inlanders — the majority of mankind — as unintelligible as a chart, dealt 

 possibly the coup de grdce to the English piscatory. See Hall, op. cit., 183. 



' It is indeed a far cry from Idyll XXI. to Endymion ; still here, even 

 though it be no piscatory eclogue, the fisher Glaucus recalls his Sicilian proto- 

 type. In Book II. 337 ff., for instance, 



" I touched no lute, I sang not, trod no measures ; 

 I was a lonely youth on desert shores " ; 



and again, 



For I would watch all night to see unfold 

 Heaven's Gate, and .<Ethon snort his morning gold 

 Wide o'er the swelling streams, and constantly 

 My nets would be spread out." 



