H poet of tbe poor 



of his kinship to the immortal Syracusan. 

 He wrote a poem " On Pastoral " in which 

 he paid this tribute to his master : 



But thee, Theocritus, wha matches? 



They 're no herd's ballats, Maro's catches. . . . 



Will nane the shepherd's whistle mair 



Blaw sweetly in its native air ? 



None of the pastoral or rustic singers 

 since Theocritus has been able to appear 

 quite so complacently at home, as if to the 

 manner born, nor so unconscious of being 

 at vulgar work while making this plebeian 

 song as was he. Our modern poets of 

 the people cannot escape the air of stoop- 

 ing, if ever so graciously, to catch the 

 note. 



Jasmin and Burns and Hogg, and in 

 some respects Ramsay, to say nothing of 

 the poets great and small who have es- 

 sayed to follow more literally in the track 

 of Theocritus, are to be read, not as 

 imitators of original Doric pastoral, but 

 as the modern species of the ancient genus 

 Bucolicus. Our American eclogue-makers 

 — Riley, with his inimitable dialect fooling, 



112 



