watch the tunny fishers cruising far below, while the echo floats
upwards of the sailors' song. These shepherds have some touch in
them of the satyr nature; we might fancy that their ears are pointed
like those of Hawthorne's Donatello, in 'Transformation.'

It should be noticed, as a proof of the truthfulness of Theocritus,
that the songs of his shepherds and goatherds are all such as he
might really have heard on the shores of Sicily. This is the real
answer to the criticism which calls him affected. When mock
pastorals flourished at the court of France, when the long dispute as
to the merits of the ancients and moderns was raging, critics vowed
that the hinds of Theocritus were too sentimental and polite in their
wooings. Refinement and sentiment were to be reserved for princely
shepherds dancing, crook in hand, in the court ballets. Louis XIV
sang of himself -


'A son labeur il passe tout d'un coup,
Et n'ira pas dormir sur la fougere,
Ny s'oublier aupres d'une Bergere,
Jusques au point d'en oublier le Loup.' {0c}


Accustomed to royal goatherds in silk and lace, Fontenelle (a severe
critic of Theocritus) could not believe in the delicacy of a Sicilian
who wore a skin 'stripped from the roughest of he-goats, with the
smell of the rennet clinging to it still.' Thus Fontenelle cries,
'Can any one suppose that there ever was a shepherd who could say
"Would I were the humming bee, Amaryllis, to flit to thy cave, and
dip beneath the branches, and the ivy leaves that hide thee"?' and