man in her presence. To discuss the influences of different forms of landownership on the sentiment of Nature would carry us too far afield; yet, if the village community of India is to be largely credited with the Indian love of Nature, the very different system of the Roman latifundia may be credited with an opposite effect. If Sicily, then, was the real home of bucolic poetry, we may feel assured that there was some special reason for the fact; that the relations of man with Nature were here less repulsive from servile associations than elsewhere; that his freedom and happiness were not so far removed from those of the bucolic Daphnis or Damœtas as to make the idyll a grotesque falsehood. No such idylls would ever have been suggested by the associations of an American slave-worked plantation any more than by those of a Roman ergastulum; and if, among all the slave-owning countries of the Alexandrian age, Sicily was the home of the idyll, we cannot help believing that, while the new poetry of Nature marks a general desire to look for poetic inspiration elsewhere than in the littleness of human individualism, it also indicates special conditions of social life in the country of the idyll.
It is the union of vivid natural descriptions with graphic pictures of simple human life and character that has made Theocritus the favourite of so many and diverse literary epochs. To sympathise truly with the dramas of Sophocles or Aristophanes, we must be largely acquainted with the contemporary spirit of social life at Athens, or even with minute points in Athenian politics. To sympathise with the odes of Pindar we must possess some of a Dissen's learning as well as a musical imagination which no learning can create. But the idylls of Theocritus present man and Nature in such simplicity that we take in all at a glance. Take, for instance, part
