translator till 1656, when Thomas Harvey published a version in
decasyllabic couplets. The next poet to appear in English dress was
Theocritus, of whose works 'Six Idillia, that is, Six Small, or Petty,
Poems, or Aeglogues,' were translated by an anonymous hand and dedicated
to E. D.--probably or possibly Sir Edward Dyer--in 1588. As before, the
verse, mostly fourteeners, is far from bad, but the selection is not very
much to our purpose. Three of the pieces, a singing match, a love
complaint, and one of the Galatea poems, are more or less pastoral; but
the rest--among which is the dainty conceit of Venus and the boar well
rendered in a three-footed measure--do not belong to bucolic verse at all.
Incidental mention may be also made of a 'dialogue betwixt two sea nymphs,
Doris and Galatea, concerning Polyphemus, briefly translated out of
Lucian,' by Giles Fletcher the elder, in his _Licia_ of 1593; and a
version of 'The First Eidillion of Moschus describing Love,' in Barnabe
Barnes' _Parthenophil and Parthenophe_, which probably appeared the same
year. Lastly we have the Bucolics and Georgics of Vergil, translated in
1589 by Abraham Fleming into rimeless fourteeners.[84] Besides these there
are a few odd translations from Vergil among the experiments of the
classical versifiers. Webbe, in his _Discourse of English Poetry_ (1586),
gives hexametrical translations of the first and second eclogues, while
another version of the second in the same metre appears first in Fraunce's
_Lawyer's Logic_ (1588), and again with corrections in his _Ivychurch_
(1591).[85] Several further translations followed in the seventeenth
century.

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. They appeared at