Page:Virgil (Collins).djvu/23



earliest written poems of Virgil, as has been said, were his Pastorals. Of these we have ten remaining, sometimes called "Bucolics"—i. e., Songs of the Herdsmen—and sometimes "Eclogues," as being "selections" from a larger number of similar compositions which the poet either never made public, or which at least are lost to us. The actual subjects of these poems are various, but they are usually introduced in the way of imaginary dialogue between Greek shepherds, keeping their flocks and herds at pasture in some imaginary woodland country, which the poet peoples with inhabitants and supplies with scenery at his will; mixing up, as poets only may, the features of his own Italian landscape with those of Sicily, borrowed, with much besides, from the Idylls of Theocritus, and with reminiscences of the Greek Arcadia. That pastoral faery-land, in which shepherds lay all day under beech-trees, playing on their pipes, either in rivalry for a musical prize or composing monodies on their lost loves, surely never existed in fact,