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Updated: May 4, 2025
Or again, in the tenth Eclogue, where the masque of shepherds and gods passes before the sick lover, it is through the same strange and golden air that they seem to move, and the heavy lilies of Silvanus droop in the stillness of the same unearthly day. Seven years following on the publication of the Eclogues were spent by Virgil on the composition of the Georgics.
Webbe, in his Discourse of English Poetry , gives hexametrical translations of the first and second eclogues, while another version of the second in the same metre appears first in Fraunce's Lawyer's Logic , and again with corrections in his Ivychurch . Several further translations followed in the seventeenth century.
Browne's eclogues are chiefly remarkable for the introduction into the first of a long and rather tedious tale derived from a manuscript of Thomas Occleve's.
He at last appeals to the king himself, but is again repulsed because he is accompanied by Truth in place of Adulation . This form of composition, recalling as it does the allegories of Langland and other satirists of the middle ages, differs widely from that usually found in the courtly eclogues, nor is it typical of rustic representations.
But their artifice had lost the gloss of novelty; and the enthusiasm which greeted the appearance of the Eclogues was due less perhaps to their intrinsic excellence than to the relief with which Roman poetry shook itself free from the fetters of so rigorous and exhausting a convention.
The first instance we shall mention is that of Battista Mantovano, whose eclogues, once much read and still worth reading, appeared among his earliest works about 1480. They are a mixture of real and conventional rusticity, but the former tends to prevail. They represent the mode of thought of a well-meaning village clergyman, not without a certain leaning to liberal ideas.
The whole poem, therefore, is a delightful commentary upon Vergil's life in Siro's garden, written probably after Siro had died, the school closed, and Varus gone off to war. The younger man's school days are now over; he had found his idiom in a poetic form to which Messalla's experiments had drawn him. The Eclogues are already appearing in rapid succession.
The whole ten eclogues did not find a translator till 1656, when Thomas Harvey published a version in decasyllabic couplets. The next poet to appear in English dress was Theocritus, of whose works 'Six Idillia, that is, Six Small, or Petty, Poems, or Aeglogues, were translated by an anonymous hand and dedicated to E. D. probably or possibly Sir Edward Dyer in 1588.
'But in thèse words, objects Carducci, 'the writer is in no way referring to the Italian eclogues of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The eclogue had passed out of its infancy in the work of Theocritus. Here, however, Carducci appears to me to misinterpret Guarini's meaning in an almost perverse manner.
Spenser. Shepheards Calender, edited with introduction and notes. London, 1897. The Introduction contains an admirable sketch of pastoral poetry in general. E. K. Chambers. English Pastorals, with an introduction. London, 1895. A collection of lyrics, eclogues, and scenes, with a useful introduction. Homer Smith. Pastoral Influence in the English Drama.
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