IMITATORS OF HES10D. 125

As cat, a good mouser, is needful in house, Because for her commons she killeth the mouse ; So ravening curs, as a many do keep, Makes master want meat, and his dog to kill sheep." p. 48, 49. Dr Thomas Warton, indeed, was disposed to regard Tusser as the mere rude beginner of what Mason per- fected in his * English Garden ; ' but it is a reasonable matter of taste whether the latter work at all comes up to the former in aught save an elegance bordering on affectation ; and certainly there is nothing in Mason to suggest the faintest comparison with Hesiod's didactic poem. Tusser's work is probably its closest parallel in all the intervening ages. It remains to inquire whether Hesiod's < Theogony ' has found with posterity as close an imitator as the work on which we have been dwelling. But this question is easily answered in the negative. The attempts of the so-called Orphic poets the most considerable of whom were Cercops, a Pythagorean, and Onomacritus, a contemporary of the Pisistratids to improve on the elder theogonies and cosmogonies, can hardly be men- tioned in this category, being more mystical than mythical, and in the nature of refinements and ab- stractions, higher than the Hesiodic chaos. Nor, though full of mythologic learning even to cumbrous- ness, can the five hymns of the Alexandrian Callima- chus be said to have aught of resemblance to the venerable system of Greek theogonies, which owes its promulgation to the genius of Hesiod. Studied and laboured to a fault, the legends which he connects