Eclogue

As a genre of poetry, Eclogues began with the Latin poet Virgil, whose collection of ten Eclogae was ultimately modelled on the Idylls of Theocritus.

[5] The practice of writing eclogues was extended by the 15th century Italian humanists Baptista Mantuanus and Jacopo Sannazaro whose Latin poetry was imitated in a variety of European vernaculars during the Renaissance, including in English.

However, "the first Renaissance bucolic poem written in England" was a 1497 eclogue in Latin by Johannes Opicius in praise of Henry VII.

[9] Spenser's eclogues were youthful work, as were Alexander Pope's Pastorals, consisting of four shepherd dialogues divided between the seasons.

[14] The impulse to renewal and parody also met in the various "town eclogues" published at this time, transferring their focus from the fields to city preoccupations.

[21] In 1811 the fortunes of the Peninsular War brought the subject back to Europe in the form of four Spanish Eclogues, including an elegy on the death of the Marquis de la Romana issued under the pseudonym Hispanicus.

[23] In the following decade they were followed by a vernacular "Irish eclogue", Darby and Teague, a satirical account of a royal visit to Dublin ascribed to William Russell Macdonald (1787–1854).

[24] The term eclogue or its equivalents was eventually applied to pastoral music, with the first significant examples being piano works by the Czech composer Václav Tomášek.

3, 1842,[28] as well as the later eighth movement of the oratorio Ruth (1882), titled eglogue biblique, a setting of the words of Alexandre Guillemin;[29][30] Antonín Dvořák, "4 eclogues for piano", Op.