To these and other tributes Moncrif adds idyls and romances of his own, while regretting that it never occurred to Theocritus to write a bergerie de chats.

Two of the pieces in this 1833 volume, the May Queen and the Miller's Daughter, were Tennyson's first poems of the affections, and as ballads of simple rustic life they anticipated his more perfect idyls in blank verse, such as Dora, the Brook, Edwin Morris, and the Gardener's Daughter.

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.