then he quotes other graceful passages from the love-verses of
Theocritean swains. Certainly no such fancies were to be expected
from the French peasants of Fontenelle's age, 'creatures blackened
with the sun, and bowed with labour and hunger.' The imaginative
grace of Battus is quite as remote from our own hinds. But we have
the best reason to suppose that the peasants of Theocritus's time
expressed refined sentiment in language adorned with colour and
music, because the modern love-songs of Greek shepherds sound like
memories of Theocritus. The lover of Amaryllis might have sung this
among his ditties -


[Greek]

'To flit towards these lips of thine, I fain would be a swallow,
To kiss thee once, to kiss thee twice, and then go flying homeward.'
{0d}


In his despair, when Love 'clung to him like a leech of the fen,' he
might have murmured -


[Greek]

'Would that I were on the high hills, and lay where lie the stags,
and no more was troubled with the thought of thee.'


Here, again, is a love-complaint from modern Epirus, exactly in the