[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, “For I would watch all night to see unfold Heaven’s Gate, and Æthon snort his morning gold Wide o’er the swelling streams, and constantly My nets would be spread out.”