and thirsty.  Serves you right!” Of course you recognize the allusion to the story of Tithonus, so beautifully told by Tennyson.  The girl’s jest has a double meaning.  The word “importunate” has the signification of a wearisome repetition of a request, a constant asking, impossible to satisfy.  Tithonus was supposed to complain because he was obliged to live although he wanted to die.  That young girl does not want to die at all.  And she says that the noise of the insect, supposed to repeat the complaint of Tithonus, only makes it more tiresome for her to work.  She was feeling, no doubt, much as a Japanese student would feel when troubled by the singing of semi on some very hot afternoon while he is trying to master some difficult problem.

That is pure Greek—­pure as another mingling of the Greek feeling with the modern scholarly spirit, entitled “An Invocation.”  Before quoting from it I must explain somewhat; otherwise you might not be able to imagine what it means, because it was written to be read by those only who are acquainted with Theocritus and the Greek idylists.  Perhaps I had better say something too, about the word idyl, for the use of the word by Tennyson is not the Greek use at all, except in the mere fact that the word signifies a picturing, a shadowing or an imagining of things.  Tennyson’s pictures are of a purely imaginative kind in the “Idyls of the King.”  But the Greek poets who first invented the poetry called idyllic did not attempt the heroic works of imagination at all; they only endeavoured to make perfectly true pictures of the common life of peasants in the country.  They wrote about the young men and young girls working on the farms, about the way they quarrelled or rejoiced or made love, about their dances and their songs, about their religious festivals and their sacrifices to the gods at the parish temple.  Imagine a Japanese scholar of to-day who, after leaving the university, instead of busying himself with the fashionable studies of the time, should go out into the remoter districts or islands of Japan, and devote his life to studying the existence of the commoner people there, and making poems about it.  This was exactly what the Greek idylists did,—­that is, the best of them.  They were great scholars and became friends of kings, but they wrote poetry chiefly about peasant life, and they gave all their genius to the work.  The result was so beautiful that everybody is still charmed by the pictures or idyls which they made.

Well, after this disgression, to return to the subject of Theocritus, the greatest of the idylists.  He has often introduced into his idyls the name of Comatas.  Who was Comatas?  Comatas was a Greek shepherd boy, or more strictly speaking a goatherd, who kept the flocks of a rich man.  It was his duty to sacrifice to the gods none of his master’s animals, without permission; but as his master was a very avaricious person, Comatas knew that it would be of little use to ask him.  Now this Comatas