Note 274 — Chapter VI · CHARACTERISTICS OF FISHERMEN IN GREECE AND ROME—POVERTY “THE BADGE OF ALL OUR TRIBE”—DEITIES OF FISHING

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.