VIRGIL'S ECLOGUES. (Virgil's Ec logues,' or Selections, also called 4Bucolics, or Songs of Herdsmen,' are 10 pastoral s, the longest of which contains 111 lines. 'Neel; were written in 43-37 a.c., when the poet was 27 to 33 years old and the times were troublous with the results of Philippi, and are his first unquestioned work. They are imitations or adaptations of the idylls of Theocritus, the Greek originator of pastoral poetry, who wrote in Syracuse and Alexandria about 270 P.c., and show that their author w-as enamored of his original and saturated with it.
The Eclogues are separable into two groups. The first group, comprising the second, third, fifth, seventh and eighth, are in the real pas toral strain, with a herdsman or shepherd soliloquizing or engaging with his fellows in a fnendly contest of song. The poems of the second group., composed after the confiscations by Octavian in 41, which involved VirOl's own estate at his brithplace, Andes, near Mantua, perhaps soon afterward restored through the offices of powerful friends, introduce real per sonages and contain many contemporary allu sions. In the first and ninth the poet himself appears in the guise of shepherd, in the sixth and tenth Varus a governor of Cisalpine Gaul, and Gallus, soldier-poet and commissioner of lands to whom, with Varus, Virgil was under obligation, are celebrated. The fourth, in honor of Pollio, the author and statesman who was Virgil's dfief patron in the recovery of his land, is the famous prophetic idyll so long thought of as a foretelling of the birth of Christ.
The Eclogues are thus a mingling of the ideal and the actual, of pastoral and political, and are imitative, conventional and artificial in the extreme. In literary history, those of the
second group are important as inaugurating the pastoral convention. The shepherds of Theocritus had been real in speech, action and environment ,• those of Virgil's second group are poets and public men masquerading as rus tics in landscapes compounded of Italy, Theocritean scenes, and the poet's Arcadia, no niore real than Marie Antoinette and her court playing dairyrnaids in the Petit Trianon. Yet in spite of their being in parts little more than translation, in spite of their mingling of the real and the ideal in the world of nature, and their dragging of city characters into pastoral scenes, criticistn has aveed that the Eclogues are poetry of a high degree of charm. Their concern is not realism, bnt beauty. They ex press so genuine and so deep a love of beauty in nature wherever it is found, that in the reading of them the imagination is as little dis turbed by the consciousness of incongruity or artificiality as it is in the reading of Lycidas, They have always been criticized for their un questioned defects, but have always been ad mired and imitated as well. aLycidas') speaks for Milton's admiration, and Pope's *Messiah,* inspired by the fourth, is only one evidence of his esteem. Horace, Patrarch, Boccaccio, Erasmus, Spenser, Coleridge and Wordsworth were fond of them, and Macaulay praised them beyond reason, setting them above both the 42Eneid' and the 'Georgics.' The Eclogues may be read in the prose trans lation of Conington, or of Fairclough in the