Note 310 — Chapter VII · THEOCRITUS—THE GREEK EPIGRAMMATISTS

Translated by Andrew Lang, 1889. The question whether Leonidas of Tarentum was, and Theocritus was not, the author of this Idyll is exhaustively treated by R. J. Cholmeley, Theocritus, pp. 54, 55. Whatever conclusion be reached, constant are the references in those Idylls whose authenticity is undoubted to fish and fishing; even in his familiar comparisons Theocritus thinks of the sea. Mr. Lang writes, “There is nothing in Wordsworth more real, more full of the incommunicable sense of Nature, rounding and softening the toilsome days of the aged and poor, than the Theocritean poem of The Fisherman’s Dream. It is as true to Nature as the statue of the naked fisherman in the Vatican.”