of the form indulged in by Callimachus, chief librarian and literary dictator, than to the inherent temper of society.  The prevailing taste was for an arrogant display of rare and costly pageantry.  At the coronation of Ptolemy Philadelphus the brilliant city surfeited on a long-drawn golden pomp, decked out in all the physical beauty the inheritance of Greek thought and memories of Greek mythology could suggest, together with a wealth of gorgeous mysticism and rapture of sensuous intoxication, which was the fruit of its intercourse with the oriental world.  The writers of Alexandria lacked the ‘high seriousness’ of purpose to produce an Aeneid, the imaginative enthusiasm needed for a Faery Queen.  What they possessed was delicacy, refinement, and wit; what they created, while perfecting the epigram and stereotyping the hymn, was a form intermediate between epic and lyric, namely the idyl as we find it in the works of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus.

It is interesting to note that the literary milieu in which Theocritus moved at Alexandria must have abounded in all those temptations which proved the bane of pastoral poetry at Rome, Florence, and Ferrara.  There were princes and patrons to be flattered, there were panegyrics to be sung and ancestral feats of arms to be recorded; nor does Theocritus appear to have stood aloof from the throng of court poetasters.  In spite of the doubtful authenticity of some of the pieces connected with his name, there appears no sufficient reason to deprive him of the rather conventional hymns and other poems composed with a view to court-favour.  These have little interest for us to-day:  his fame rests on works which probably gained him little advantage at the time.  It was for his own solace, forgetful for a moment of the intrigues of court life and the uncertain sunshine of princes, that he wrote his Sicilian idyls.  For him, as at a magic touch, the walls of the heated city melted like a mirage into the sands of the salt lagoon, and he wandered once more amid the green woods and pastures of Trinacria, the noonday sun tempered by the shade of the chestnuts and the babbling of the brook, and by the cool airs that glide down from the white cliffs of Aetna.  There once more he saw the shepherds tend their flocks, singing or wrangling with one another, dreamily piping on their wax-stopped reeds or plotting to annex their neighbours’ gear; or else there sounded in his ears the love-song or the dirge, or the incantation of the forsaken girl rose amid the silence to the silver moon.  Once again he stood upon the shore and watched the fishers cast their nets, while around him the goats browsed on the close herbage of the cliff, and the crystal stream leapt down, and the waves broke upon the rocks below, till he saw the breasts of the nymphs shine in the whiteness of the foam and their hair spread wide in the weed, and the fair Galatea, the enticing and the fickle, mocked the clumsy suit