Theo

'love of ease,' 'approbation of innocence and simplicity,' and 'love of the country;' and all these are natural to man. critus is the great master of pastoral; Virgil sacrifices simplicity to nobleness and sublimity, and some of his Eclogues are not properly pastorals at all. The Italians are 'fond of surprising conceits and far-fetched imaginations,' as is shown in Tasso's Aminta and Guarini's Pastor Fido. 'The French are so far from thinking abstrusely that they often seem not to think at all;' 'they fall into the manner of their country, which is gallantry,' and the dresses and manners of their shepherds are like those of a court and ball-room. The English have too servilely copied the Greek and Roman pastorals; Spenser and A. Philips have succeeded best, since they have 'not only copied but improved the beauties of the ancients.' The manner of the ancients should be followed, but deviations as to climate, customs, and the soil and its products, are to be recommended. The theology of the Pagan pastoral may be retained, where 'universally known; and all else should be made up of our own rustical superstition of fairies, goblins, &c.-since no man can be delighted with the imitation of what he is ignorant of.' On April 27, 1713 (Guardian, No. 40), appeared a mock comparison of Philips's with Pope's Pastorals, really written by Pope himself, in which he gave the palm of superiority to his own poems under pretence of preferring those of his rival. The whole production is ironical, and it ends by asserting of Pope's Pastorals that 'they are by no means pastorals, but something better.' Here we must not omit to notice Gay's burlesque pastorals, entitled the Shepherd's Week, both because many of his remarks, though ironically uttered, really bear on the matter before us, and because there has been from time to time so much ludicrous misconception as to their object and character. We make the following extracts from the Proeme to the Shepherd's Week, which appeared in 1714: 'Great marvel hath it been that in this our island of Britain no poet hath hit on the right simple eclogue after the true ancient guise of Theocritus before this mine attempt. My love to my country much pricketh me

...

forward to describe aright the manners of our own honest ploughmen; albeit not ignorant am I what a rout and rabblement of critical gallimawfry hath been made by certain young men concerning I wist not what Golden Age and other outrageous conceits to which they would confine pastoral. This idle trumpery unto that ancient Doric shepherd Theocritus was never known. It is therefore my purpose to set forth before thee a picture of thy own country. Thou wilt not find my shepherdesses idly piping on oaten reeds, but milking the kine, tying up the sheaves, &c. Spenser I must acknowledge a bard of sweetest memorial; yet hath his shepherd's boy at times raised his rustic reed to rhymes more rumbling than rural. Diverse grave points hath he also handled of churchly matter, to great clerks only appertaining. His names [are] indeed right simple and meet for the country (Lobbin, Cuddy, &c.), some of which I have made bold to borrow. The language of my shepherds is such as is neither spoken by the country maiden nor the courtly dame, having too much of the country to be fit for the court, too much of the court to be fit for the country. But here again much comfort ariseth in me from the hopes that some lover of simplicity shall arise who shall render these mine eclogues into such more modern dialect as shall be then understood.'1

In the pieces which follow, Gay's object was to ridicule pastoral itself by presenting a homely and often coarse picture of rustic life as a set-off against the 'golden age' view we have mentioned; and in doing so he claims simply to be going back to Theocritus, the fountain-head of all bucolic poetry, who was himself faithful to nature. Nor can it be denied that Gay

1 Dr. Johnson (Life of Gay) says that Pope 'is supposed to have incited Gay to write the Shepherd's Week, to show that, if it be necessary to copy nature with minuteness, rural life must be exhibited such as grossness and ignorance have made it. The Pastorals are introduced by a l'roeme, written in imi

tation of obsolete language. But the effect of reality and truth became conspicuous, even when the intention was to show them grovelling and degraded. These Pastorals became popular, and were read with delight by those who had no interest in the rivalry of the poets, nor knowledge of the critical dispute.'

does in this respect present us with a superficial copy of his alleged model in almost everything but the ridiculous names (Blowselinda, Bowsybæus, &c.) he gives to some of his characters, which are not at all after the style of those adopted by Theocritus. How then is it that Gay's pastorals are on the whole an evident burlesque, while those of Theocritus are as evidently real? It cannot be merely a question of coarseness as contrasted with refinement, for there are indecencies in some of the Idylls to which no parallel can be found in the Shepherd's Week. As a poet of course Theocritus has the advantage; but this does not make all the difference between them. The solution seems to be in some way as follows. Both poets described actual facts of rural life and in homely language; but the kind of rural life Theocritus had to describe was very different from that which came under the notice of Gay. Thou wilt not find my shepherdesses idly piping on oaten reeds, but milking the kine, tying sheaves,' &c. Just so; but the shepherds of Theocritus did pipe as well as milk and bind sheaves ; and if they had not piped, or if no shepherds had ever done so, the production which we call Pastoral Poetry would never have existed. This does not consist merely in a description of rustic manners. To us it is purely artificial, and has been so in all countries ever since Virgil's time; but to Theocritus and his contemporaries it was a reality -a substantially correct reproduction of the doings, feelings, occupations, and utterances of the Sicilian shepherds - and afterwards but too often an ungainly mimicry of what once had

From not observing this fact, Crabbe made the genuine mistake embodied in the following lines from his poem The Village (1783) :

'On Mincio's banks in Cæsar's bounteous reign,

If Tityrus found the golden age again,

Must sleepy bards the flattering dreams prolong,

Mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song ?

1

life and reality. The shepherd's pipe, which was at first real, became afterwards a sham; and the poetry met with much the same fate. Owing to the nature of its climate and its manners, England is not a country in which shepherds could practise piping and singing like the Dorian swains; and perhaps neither the genius nor the language of the English race would ever have fostered anything like the true ancient pastoral amongst us.1

Of those critics, who fell into the error of identifying the pastoral with rural poetry in general, Dr. Johnson may be fairly taken as the representative. In the Rambler he remarks, 'The true definition of a pastoral is a poem in which any action or passion is represented by its effects upon a country life, and has nothing peculiar but its confinement to rural imagery, without which it ceases to be pastoral.' Hence he thinks those writers are wrong who insist upon a golden age, meanness of sentiment and language, and confinement to persons of low rank. Still the interest should be centred in rural life, and therefore should not contain allusions to the Church or State, or 'lamentations on the death of some illustrious person, whom when once the poet has called a shepherd he has no longer any labour upon his hands, but can make the lilies wither and the sheep hang their heads, without any art or learning, genius or study.' On the misconception involved in refusing to admit political allusions into the pastoral we have already remarked (p. 13); that there is the essence of truth in the last quoted sentence (minus the sarcasm) every reader will allow. We will close this part of our subject by citing a still more sarcastic

'In England every poet who

has tried to play on the Doric pipe has sounded a false note. There is nothing in our damp island atmosphere, or in our own character, to favour that easy, contented, grasshopper life which still marks the peoples of the South.'-Quarterly Review, July 1873.

mangled dialect which no human being could ever have spoken,' and quotes the opening of the 9th Eclogue,

'Diggon Davie ! I bidde her god daye;

Or Diggon her is, or I missaye,' &c. -which Pope affected to admire in his ironical essay in the Guardian, No. 40.

utterance of the same critic, in his life of A. Philips (1781), which nevertheless gives us a perfectly true account of the reasons why the writing of pastorals became so fashionable. 'At the revival of learning in Italy, it was soon discovered that a dialogue of imaginary swains might be composed with little difficulty; because the conversation of shepherds excludes profound or refined sentiment, and for images and descriptions satyrs, fauns, &c., were always within call; and woods, rivers, &c., supplied variety of matter, which having a natural power to soothe the mind did not quickly cloy it.' Add to this the wellknown charms of the country and its associations, and the relief which these afford from the turmoils of life, to the imagination at least, if not always in reality, and we shall cease to wonder at the vitality of a species of composition which held its ground for so many centuries, though it has now, perhaps for ever, passed away.

Hence it will appear that even if Lycidas were a formally cast Pastoral, ample license by precedents would be allowed for the method in which Milton has treated his subject. We are now in a position to consider a few of the criticisms which have been passed upon the poem itself. That of Dr. Johnson in his Lives of the Poets is the best known and the most unfavourable of all. In his Life of Milton he writes:-'The diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing not the effusion of real passion, which runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Where there is leisure for fiction there is little No nature, for there is no truth; no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting.

grief.

When Cowley tells

Hervey that they studied together, it is easy to suppose how much he must miss the companion of his labours; but what image of tenderness can be excited by these lines: "We drove afield, &c."? Though the representation may be allegorical, the true meaning is so uncertain and remote that it is never sought, because it cannot be known

C2