Very epigrammatic that, and as unlike pastoral as the ball-rooms could desire! It was a horrible spoiling of Virgil:—
Malo me Galatea petit, lasciva puella,
Et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri.
—Eclog. iii. v. 64.
Thus translated by Dryden:—
My Phillis me with pelted apples plies;
Then tripping to the woods the wanton hies,
And wishes to be seen before she flies.
The Latin poet, too, in the flight of the damsel, added a charming idea to the one suggested by Theocritus; if, indeed, the Greek did not give the first hint of it himself—
Βάλλει καὶ μαλοίσι τὸν αἰπόλον ἁ Κλεάριστα,
Τὰς αἷγας παρέλευντα, και ἁδὺ τι ποππυλιάδει.
—Idyll v., v. 88.
Literally, “Clearista pelts the goatherd with apples, as he goes by with his goats, and then hums something sweet.”
The goatherd here does not seem to stop. It is not certain that he and the damsel are acquainted; though he wishes to imply that she loves him. In case they are intimate, we are to suppose that she intends him to imagine her saying something very pleasant, though he is too far off to hear it; but in the other case, Virgil probably understood her to pretend that she had not pelted the apples at all; for which reason she falls to humming a tune, with an air of innocent indifference.
Be this as it may, nobody will deny the truly natural and Theocritan style in which the modern Sicilian has enlarged upon the old suggestion.
“Meli,” says the reviewer, “introduces a group of fishing-girls, chattering and joking, and telling of their loves, in the absence of their parents. Their very names, Pidda, Lidda, and Ridda, sound congenial to their condition. To an invitation to go and romp on the sands, Lidda prudishly replies that she is afraid of meeting some rude swain. Ridda also tells a story of having seen a fisherman concealed behind the rocks, who addresses her in an amorous song, which frightened her out of her senses. But Pidda, who is the eldest of the three, loses patience at this affected simplicity, and exclaims—