Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

;THEOCRITUS AND ENGLISH POETS 119the stock in trade of the Bucoliastae in Cos, Sicily,and MagnaGraecia.iThe influence of Theocritus on fishing literature in mime,epigram, or romance is writ large in the pages not only ofMoschus, Leonidas of Tarentum, Alciphron, Plautus, Ovid,but also of Sannazaro in the fifteenth, of our Spenser 2 and hisfollowers in the sixteenth and subsequent centuries, and evenof Keats. 3This influence shows most widely in the more abundant* This name was applied, according to Athenasus, XIV. lo, from thepeculiar poetry made by those who kept cattle.» The Faerie Queen, especially Books I„ II., III. Of the other writers, Isimply cite (A) Piscatorie Eclogs, 1633, and in a lesser degree Sicelides, 1631,of Phineas Fletcher, perhaps the most conspicuous writer of fisher Idylls inEnglish, whom Izaak Walton terms " an excellent divine, and an excellentangler, and author of excellent Piscatory Eclogues " (B) Nereides or Sea;Eclogues (of which only one is strictly a fisher eclogue) published anonymouslyin 1712, but to be followed the next year by Dryades, by Diaper (translatorwith his fellow Fellow of Balliol of Oppian's Halieutica), which Swift commendsto Stella as the earliest book of its kind in English, a statement whichhas been ampUfied into " the only book of its kind in any literature," for hisMuse dives to a new Arcadia set in the coral — groves of the deep sea, and thenceevokes the characters of his Eclogues " mermen and nereids who behaveexactly like the personages in Virgil and in Sannazaro " ;(C) WilliamBrowne, Britannia's Pastorals (1613-1616), in which fishing, although butincidentally introduced, is well and truly described, notably the passage inBook I., Song 5, about the capture of the pike ;(D) Moses Browne (whoendeavoured to show that Angling comes fairly within the range of thePastoral), the author of the most popular of all English fishing idylls. AnglingSports in Nine Piscatory Eclogues, 1729; (E) William Thompson's Hymn toMay (1758); (F) John Gay, whose Rural Sports (1713) is, however, more ofan angling georgic than a piscatory eclogue.The eclogue, piscatory or other, was severely criticised by Dryden, whocomplaining of its affectation that shepherds had always to be in love, roundlystated, " This Phylissing comes from Italy " ; by Pope, who found fault withTheocritus because of his introduction of " fishers and harvesters " ; byDr. Johnson, whose denunciation (in his essay, The Reason why PastoralsDelight) of Sannazaro for his introduction into the eclogue of the sea, whichby presenting much less variety than the land must soon exhaust the possibilitiesof marine imagery, and known only to a few must always remain tothe inlanders—the majority of mankind—as unintelligible as a chart, dealtpossibly the coup de grdce to the English piscatory. See Hall, op. cit., 183.' It is indeed a far cry from Idyll XXI. to Endymion ; still here, eventhough it be no piscatory eclogue, the fisher Glaucus recalls his Sicilian prototype.In Book II. 337 ff., for instance," I touched no lute, I sang not, trod no measuresand again,I was a lonely youth on desert shores " ;For I would watch all night to see unfoldHeaven's Gate, and .