Never loved a truer youth.
Thus with many a pretty oath,
Yea and nay, and faith and troth,
Such as silly shepherds use
When they will not Love abuse,
Love which had been long deluded
Was with kisses sweet concluded;
And Phyllida, with garlands gay,
Was made the lady of the May.

We must now turn to the beginnings of regular pastoral tradition in this
country, springing up under direct foreign influence and in conscious and
avowed imitation of specific foreign models. Passing over the Latin
eclogues of Buchanan and John Barclay, as belonging properly to the sphere
of humanistic rather than of English letters, we come to the pretty
thoroughly Latinized pastorals of Alexander Barclay and Barnabe Googe.
Their preoccupation with the humanistic poets is, in Barclay's case at any
rate, no less dominant a factor than in that of the regular translators,
from whom it is neither very easy nor clearly desirable to distinguish
them. Of the professed translators themselves it may be well to say a few
words in this place and allow them at once to resume their veil of
well-deserved oblivion. Their influence may be taken as non-existent, and
their only interest lies in the indication they afford of the trend of
literary fashion. The earliest was George Turberville, who in 1567
translated the first nine of Mantuan's eclogues into English fourteeners.
The verse is fairly creditable, but the exaggeration of style,
endeavouring by sheer brutality of phrase to force the moral judgement it
lacks the art of more subtly stimulating, produces neither a very pleasing
nor a very edifying effect. This translation went through three editions
before the end of the century. The whole ten eclogues did not find a