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 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.