of the Cyclops, as she tossed upward the bitter spray from off her shining limbs.  All these memories he recorded with a loving faithfulness of detail that it is even now possible to verify from the folk-songs of the south.  To this day in the Isles of Greece ruined girls seek to lure back their lovers with charms differing but little from that sung by the Syracusan to Lady Selene, and the popular poetry alike of Italy and Greece is full of those delicate touches of refined sentiment that in Theocritus appear so incongruous with the rough coats and rougher banter of the shepherds.  For though the poet raised the pastoral life of Sicily into the realms of ideal poetry, he was careful not to dissociate his version from reality, and he allowed no imaginary conceptions to overmaster his art.  He depicted no age of innocence; his poetry reflects no philosophical illusion of primitive simplicity; he elaborated no imaginary cult of mystical worship.  His art, however little it may tempt us to the use of the term realism, is nevertheless based on an almost passionate sympathy with actual human nature.  This is the fount of his inspiration, the central theme of his song.  The literary genius of Greece showed little aptitude for landscape, and seldom treated inanimate nature except as a background for human action and emotion, or it may be in the guise of mythological allegory.  Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that Theocritus, so tenderly concerned with the homely aspects of human life, was not likewise sensitive to the beauties of nature.  At least it is impossible to doubt his attachment to the land of his childhood, and it is at worst a welcome dream when we imagine him, as the evening of life drew on, leaving the formal gardens and painted landscapes of Alexandria and returning to Syracuse and his beloved Sicily once more.[5]

The verse of Theocritus was echoed by his younger contemporaries, Bion and Moschus.[6] The former is best known through the oriental passion of his ‘Woe, woe for Adonis,’ probably written to be sung at the annual festival of Syrian origin commemorated by Theocritus in his fifteenth idyl.[7] The most important extant work of Moschus is the ’Lament for Bion,’ characterized by a certain delicate sentimentality alien to the spirit of either of his predecessors.  It is perhaps significant that Theocritus appears to have been of Syracusan, Bion of Smyrnian, and Moschus of Ausonian origin.[8] With the exception of this poem, which is modelled on Theocritus’ ‘Lament for Daphnis,’ there is little in the work of either of the younger poets of a pastoral nature.  Certain fragments, however, if genuine, suggest that poems of the kind may have perished.  Among the remains of Moschus occurs the following: 

    Would that my father had taught me the craft of a keeper of sheep,
    For so in the shade of the elm-tree, or under the rocks on the steep,
    Piping on reeds I had sat, and had lulled my sorrow to sleep;[9]