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Updated: May 4, 2025
The division is necessarily somewhat arbitrary, for the two traditions act and react on one another incessantly, and the types merge almost imperceptibly the one into the other; but that does not prevent the spirit that manifests itself in Drayton's eclogues being essentially different from that which produced Breton's songs.
If you had questioned him closely, he would perhaps have confessed that he did think something better might be done in the way of Eclogues and Georgics, or of Odes and Epodes, and that to his mind poetry was something very different from what had hitherto been known under that name.
The poems that were written after his arrival in London, when his mind was agitated by wild speculations, and thrown off its balance by noise and bustle, were, as might be expected, very unequal to those which he had produced in the retirement of his native place. Yet there is much poignancy in the satires. The three African eclogues have a tumid grandeur. Heccar and Gaira is the best of them.
But had Virgil made his first public appearance merely as a Court poet, it is probable that the Eclogues would have roused little enthusiasm and little serious criticism.
But one step, and that a short one, removed from these writers is Alexander Barclay, translater of Brandt's Stultifera Navis, priest and monk successively of Ottery St. Mary, Ely, and Canterbury. It seems to have been about 1514, when at the second of these houses, that he composed at least the earlier and larger portion of his eclogues.
Augustin, in his great treatise, De Civitate Dei, tell the same story, and Virgil, in his Eclogues, has sung the same belief . The Latins called such a man, a turnskin versipellis, an expression which exactly agrees with the Icelandic expression for the same thing, and which is probably the true original of our turncoat.
These, however, are found in conjunction with idealized elements of courtly tradition, both in the dramatic eclogues themselves and more especially in the ecloghe maggiaiuole or May-day shows of the Congrega dei Rozzi.
Its introduction stamps his eclogues with that unreality which has been the reproach of the pastoral from his day to ours. The didactic homily was one fresh convention introduced. Far more important was the tendency to make every form subserve some ulterior purpose of allegory and panegyric. For the Roman its own beauty was no sufficient end of art.
And there was one small, slim book that he always carried about with him, and kept for special reading in the fields and woods. This was Virgil's Eclogues, the sylvan atmosphere of which penetrated the very depths of his being, and created in him a moral or spiritual atmosphere which was its counterpart.
He induced ten students to join him, and hired Professor Dunshee to give them lessons for one month. During that time he read the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil entire, and the first six books of Homer's Iliad, accompanied by a thorough drill in the Latin and Greek grammar. He must have "toiled terribly," and could have had few moments for recreation.
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