"If I might now venture to speak of the merits of the several pastoral writers, I would say, that in Theocritus we are charmed with a certain sweetness, a romantic rusticity and wildness, heightened by the Doric dialect, that are almost inimitable... Several of his pieces indicate a genius of a higher class, far superior to pastoral, and equal to the sublimest species of poetry."
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Joseph Warton, A Dissertation upon Pastoral Poetry (1753).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Theocritus
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Theocritus
Theocritus (fl. c. 270 BC) was a Greek poet of the 3rd century BC, probably a Syracusan who later lived in Kos and Alexandria. He invented the genre of pastoral poetry.
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