ὄλβιος ὁ γριπεὺς ἰδίη καὶ πόντον ἐπέπλει νηΐι, καὶ ἐξ ἰδίης ἕδραμεν εἰς Ἀΐδην.
[270] For this and other passages quoted or incorporated, I am greatly in debt to Dr. Henry Marion Hall’s Idylls of Fishermen, New York, 1912 and 1914, and to A. F. Campaux’s preface to his De Ecloga Piscatoris qualem: veteribus adumbratam absolvere sibi proposuit Sannazarius, Paris, 1859.
[271] And yet “the eternal feminine” question was to the fore very early, as we see from the old oracle quoted by Herodotus, VI. 77: “But when the female at last shall conquer the male in the battle, Conquer and drive him forth, and glory shall gain among Argives.”
[272] Poll., Onomasticon, 10, 52, and 10, 45. In later literature references, etc., to fish are countless: one of the lost plays of Aristophanes bore, indeed, the title of The Eel, according to Keller, op. cit., 357.
[273] This name was applied, according to Athenæus, XIV. 10, from the peculiar poetry made by those who kept cattle.
[274] The Faerie Queen, especially Books I., II., III. Of the other writers, I simply cite (A) Piscatorie Eclogs, 1633, and in a lesser degree Sicelides, 1631, of Phineas Fletcher, perhaps the most conspicuous writer of fisher Idylls in English, whom Izaak Walton terms “an excellent divine, and an excellent angler, and author of excellent Piscatory Eclogues”; (B) Nereides or Sea Eclogues (of which only one is strictly a fisher eclogue) published anonymously in 1712, but to be followed the next year by Dryades, by Diaper (translator with his fellow Fellow of Balliol of Oppian’s Halieutica), which Swift commends to Stella as the earliest book of its kind in English, a statement which has been amplified into “the only book of its kind in any literature,” for his Muse dives to a new Arcadia set in the coral groves of the deep sea, and thence evokes the characters of his Eclogues—“mermen and nereids who behave exactly like the personages in Virgil and in Sannazaro”; (C) William Browne, Britannia’s Pastorals (1613-1616), in which fishing, although but incidentally introduced, is well and truly described, notably the passage in Book I., Song 5, about the capture of the pike; (D) Moses Browne (who endeavoured to show that Angling comes fairly within the range of the Pastoral), the author of the most popular of all English fishing idylls, Angling Sports in Nine Piscatory Eclogues, 1729; (E) William Thompson’s Hymn to May (1758); (F) John Gay, whose Rural Sports (1713) is, however, more of an angling georgic than a piscatory eclogue.
The eclogue, piscatory or other, was severely criticised by Dryden, who complaining of its affectation that shepherds had always to be in love, roundly stated, “This Phylissing comes from Italy”; by Pope, who found fault with Theocritus because of his introduction of “fishers and harvesters”; by Dr. Johnson, whose denunciation (in his essay, The Reason why Pastorals Delight) of Sannazaro for his introduction into the eclogue of the sea, which by presenting much less variety than the land must soon exhaust the possibilities of marine imagery, and known only to a few must always remain to the inlanders—the majority of mankind—as unintelligible as a chart, dealt possibly the coup de grâce to the English piscatory. See Hall, op. cit., 183.
[275] It is indeed a far cry from Idyll XXI. to Endymion; still here, even though it be no piscatory eclogue, the fisher Glaucus recalls his Sicilian prototype. In Book II. 337 ff., for instance,
“I touched no lute, I sang not, trod no measures; I was a lonely youth on desert shores”;
and again,