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Updated: May 4, 2025
The Latin works were first published at Naples in 1536, and though far from rivalling the popularity of the Arcadia, went through several editions. The Latin eclogues of the renaissance are distinguished from all other forms of allegory by the obscure and recondite allusions that they affected.
As THEOCRITUS is famoused for his Idyllia in Greek, and VIRGIL for his Eclogues in Latin: so SPENSER their imitator in his Shepherds Calendar is renowned for the like argument; and honoured for fine poetical invention, and most exquisite wit. As PARTHENIUS Nicaeus excellently sang the praises of ARETE: so DANIEL hath divinely sonnetted the matchless beauty of DELIA.
Even the terrible bagpipe of the second rhapsody for oboe; even the caldron of the "Pagan Poem," that transcription of the most sensual and impassioned of Virgil's eclogues, with its mystic, dissonant trumpets; even the blasphemies of "La Villanelle du Diable," and the sundown fires that beat through the close of "Hora mystica" are curiously bloodless and ghostly and unsubstantial.
Nymphs and shepherds appear as in the pastoral eclogues, but their loves are interrupted by the incursion of boisterous rustics, who substitute the unchastened instincts and brute force of half-savage boors for the delicate wooing and sentimentality of their rivals.
"The author of that book, too," said the curate, "is a great friend of mine, and his verses from his own mouth are the admiration of all who hear them, for such is the sweetness of his voice that he enchants when he chants them: it gives rather too much of its eclogues, but what is good was never yet plentiful: let it be kept with those that have been set apart. But what book is that next it?"
If this be true, the first and last few lines were fitted on later, when the whole book was published, to adapt the poem for its honorable position at the close of the volume. The first and ninth Eclogues, and only these, concern the confiscations of land at Cremona and Mantua which threatened to deprive Vergil's father of his estates and consequently the poet of his income.
The rustic poems of Theocritus were so highly valued by the Greeks and Romans that they attracted the imitation of Virgil, whose Eclogues seem to have been considered as precluding all attempts of the same kind; for no shepherds were taught to sing by any succeeding poet, till Nemesian and Calphurnius ventured their feeble efforts in the lower age of Latin literature.
There is, however, one great artistic blemish, for which the poet's courage, not his taste, is to blame. We have already spoken of his affection for Gallus, celebrated in the most extravagant but yet the most ethereally beautiful of the Eclogues; and this affection, unbroken by the disgrace and exile of its object, had received a yet more splendid tribute in the episode which closed the Georgics.
There are not a few later productions in the kind which may be reasonably held to surpass it in poetic merit, but all alike sink into insignificance by the side of Spenser's eclogues when the influence they exercised on the history of English verse is taken into account.
Even this inverted correspondence, however, is for the most part lacking in the subsequent eclogues, and it must be admitted that in so far as Spenser depended on a cyclic correlation for the unifying of his design, he achieved at best but partial effect.
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