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And so it has occurred to me to give in these pages one episode of his career that seems to me quite curious, together with some significant touches concerning the man as apart from the socialist. Let the thousands of volumes already in existence suffice for the latter. The motto of this paper is not the Vergilian "Arms and the man I sing," but simply "The man I sing" and the woman.
Lodge was happier in the lyric verses with which he strewed his romances such for instance as the lines to Phoebe in Rosalynde, though these did certainly lay themselves open to parody . In the same romance Lodge rose for once to a perfection of delicate conceit unsurpassed from his day to ours: The year 1595 also saw the publication of Francis Sabie's Pan's Pipe, which contains, according to the not wholly accurate title-page, 'Three Pastorall Eglogues, in English Hexameter. These constituted the first attempt in English at writing original eclogues in Vergilian metre, and the injudicious experiment has not, I believe, been repeated.
As regarded the strictures of his correspondent, his triumphant answer in the shape of the Paradiso lay yet unfinished, so the author of the De Vulgari Eloquio trifled with the charge and purported to compose the present poem in earnest of reform. There is a tone of not unkindly irony about the whole. Was it an elaborate jest at the expense of Giovanni, the writer of Vergilian verse?
In the revival side by side of Homeric and Vergilian study it is easy to see the reflection of two currents of contrasted sentiment which are telling on the world around us.
The 'Ecloga Theoduli' alluded to by Chaucer in the House of Fame appears to be the work of an Athenian writer, and is ascribed to various dates ranging from the fifth to the eighth centuries. While preserving as its main characteristic a close subservience to its Vergilian model, the eclogue participated in the general rise of allegory which marked the later middle ages.
Thus before the revival of learning had made Greek a possible source of literary inspiration, the Vergilian tradition, through the instrumentality of Petrarch and Boccaccio, had already made itself supreme in pastoral . During the middle ages the stream of pastoral production, though it nowhere actually disappears, is reduced to the merest trickle.
* I think Carex will be found ultimately better than Cyperus for the generic name, being the Vergilian word, and representing a larger sub-species. For consider a little what each of those five tribes* has been to the spirit of man.
It has many imaginative phrases, and the meticulous exactness of its miniature work might seem to be Vergilian were it not for the unrelieved plainness of the theme. Even so, it might be considered an experiment in a new style, if the rather dubious manuscript evidence were supported by a single ancient citation. See Rand, loc.
We need not then concern ourselves in a Vergilian biography with the tale that Arrius or Clodius or Claudius or Milienus Toro chased the poet into a coal-bin or ducked him into the river. The shepherds of the poem are typical characters made to pass through the typical experiences of times of distress. The first Eclogue, Tityre tu, is even more general than the ninth in its application.
When Boccaccio wrote, the eclogue had not yet degenerated into the literary convention it became in the following century; and, though he was no doubt tempted to the use of the form by Vergilian tradition and the example of Petrarch, he must also have followed therein a natural inclination and no mere dictate of fashion.
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