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The remembrance of one thing which supplied the place of all these was what I had read the evening before my departure. I recollect, also, the pastorals of Gessner, which his translator Hubert had sent me a little time before.
The reading public which, during the previous century, had swallowed mock pastorals, made in Fleet Street, with perfect serenity, was now, thanks to the slowly-working influence of Wordsworth and the other Lake poets, prepared for a renaissance of nature and simplicity in prose.
They desire his settling amongst them, appreciate the benefits of commerce and civilisation, and are not suspicious, like the plundering pastorals, of every one coming with evil intentions towards them.
James's; and Fiddy with her "equipage" scissors, tablets, and all, chased and wreathed with tiny pastorals, shepherds reclining and piping on sylvan banks, and shepherds and shepherdesses dancing on velvet lawns.
With these two productions may for the purposes of criticism be classed Thomas Randolph's Amyntas, which, however inferior to the others in poetic merit, yet like them stands apart in certain matters of intention and origin from the general run of pastorals, and may, moreover, well support a claim to be considered one of the three chief English examples of the kind.
But, like other mechanical arts, it was gradually improved by means of many experiments and many failures. It was reserved for Pope to discover the trick, to make himself complete master of it, and to teach it to everybody else. From the time when his Pastorals appeared, heroic versification became matter of rule and compass; and, before long, all artists were on a level.
Every one of these jolly faces was on the broad grin, from the dusky mother to the india-rubber child sprawling upon her back, and the venerable jetty senior whose wool was as white as that of a sheep in Florian's pastorals. To these dancers a couple of fellows were playing on a drum and a little banjo.
Afterwards he read Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," and he formed a great passion for Pope's "Pastorals," which he imitated in their easy heroics; but till he came to read Longfellow, and Tennyson, and Heine, he never read any long poem without more fatigue than pleasure.
Cowly, Crashaw, and Cleveland were ejected from their fellowships. The young candidate for academical honours was no longer required to write Ovidian epistles or Virgilian pastorals, but was strictly interrogated by a synod of lowering Supralapsarians as to the day and hour when he experienced the new birth. Such a system was of course fruitful of hypocrites.
I shall, therefore, venture to lay before you, such observations as have risen to my mind in the consideration of Virgil's pastorals, without any inquiry how far my sentiments deviate from established rules or common opinions. If we survey the ten pastorals in a general view, it will be found that Virgil can derive from them very little claim to the praise of an inventor.
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