THEOCRITUS AND ENGLISH POETS 119 
the stock in trade of the Bucoliaste in Cos, Sicily, and Magna 
Grecia.! 
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 
1 This name was applied, according to Athenzus, XIV. 10, from the 
peculiar poetry made by those who kept cattle. 58 
2 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 amplified 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 Pastovals (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, 
“T 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 thon snort his morning gold 
Wide o’er the swelling streams, and constantly 
My nets would be spread out.” 
