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The following lines from the fifth eclogue may serve to illustrate Barclay's style: It is in justice due to Barclay to say that the fact of his composing this eclogue in the vernacular should possibly be counted to him as an original step. The step had, indeed, been taken in Italy before he was born, but of this he may, in spite of his travels, have been ignorant.
Vergil's companions in the Cecropius hortulus, destined to be his life-long friends, were, according to Probus, Quintilius Varus, the famous critic, Varius Rufus, the writer of epics and tragedies, and Plotius Tucca. Of his early friendship with Varius he has left a remembrance in Catalepton I and VII, with Varus in Eclogue VI. Horace combined all these names more than once in his verses.
Dear Southey, I thank you heartily for the eclogue ; it pleases me mightily, being so full of picture-work and circumstances. I find no fault in it, unless perhaps that Joanna's ruin is a catastrophe too trite; and this is not the first or second time you have clothed your indignation, in verse, in a tale of ruined innocence.
But the fourteenth-century school of Petrarch had not been entirely without its representative in Italian. At least one poem included by Boccaccio in his Ameto is a strict eclogue, composed throughout in terza rima, which was destined to become the standard verse-form for 'pastoral, as ottava rima for 'rustic, composition.
Some years later a further step was taken in the dramatization of the eclogue by Luigi Tansillo in his Due pelegrini, performed at Messina in 1538, though composed and probably originally acted some ten years before. It is through these and similar poems that we shall have to trace the gradual evolution of the pastoral drama in a later section of this work.
It is an eclogue in which two shepherds, representing respectively the upper and lower orders of Spanish society, discourse together on the causes of national discontent and political corruption prevalent about 1472, at the latter end of the weak reign of Enrique IV. In this poem we find the king's infatuation for his Portuguese mistress treated much as Petrarch had treated the relations of Clement VI with the allegorical Epi, except for the striking difference that the Latin of the Italian poet is replaced by straightforward and vigorous vernacular.
The picture, in the sixth Eclogue, of the fawn lying among the white lilies, will recall to English readers one of the prettiest fancies of Marvell; that in the second, of Flora scattering her tresses over the spring meadow, and Pomona playing under the orchard boughs, is at least a vivid pictorial presentment of a sufficiently well-worn theme.
Verse follows verse in steady succession, and the singer who hesitates is lost: his rival rushes in with a tide of rhyme which carries all before it. In such primitive pleasures the shepherds of the Virgilian eclogue indulged. As the life of the peasant, so is that of his wife or sweetheart. She shares in the work, guiding the oxen, cutting grass, even working on the road with hoe and basket.
This eclogue contains Spenser's chief tribute to Chaucer: The July eclogue again leads us into the realm of ecclesiastical politics. It is a disputation between upland and lowland shepherds, the descendant therefore of Mantuan and Barclay, though the use of 'high places' as typifying prelatical pride appears to be original.
Vergil's own words would imply that his early effort centered about Aeneas' wars in Italy; the sixth Eclogue, Cum canerem reges et proelia, is rather explicit on this point. It is, however, in reading the first and fifth books that I think we may profit most by keeping in mind the fact that the poet had begun the Aeneid before Caesar's death.
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