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This observation might be exemplified by more instances than some readers might choose to read. It will be sufficient to observe with what art both Pope and Fontenelle have drawn up their Essays on the nature of Pastoral Poetry, that the rules they wished to establish might be adapted to their own pastorals.
In his 'Shepherd's Pipe, a series of 'Eclogues' Browne follows this plan; but 'Britannia's Pastorals' contains rambling stories of Hamadryads and Oreads; figures which are too shadowy to seem real, yet stand in exquisite woodland landscapes.
In the age which admired the smooth feebleness of Shenstone's pastorals and elegies, and which closed when the libels of Churchill were held to be good examples of poetical satire, Gray turned aside from the unrequited labors of verse to idle in his study, and Collins lived and died almost unknown.
Steele, in some papers of the Guardian, had praised Ambrose Philips as the pastoral writer that yielded only to Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser. Pope, who had also published pastorals, not pleased to be overlooked, drew up a comparison of his own compositions with those of Philips, in which he covertly gave himself the preference, while he seemed to disown it.
He had no school, and his love of music and society the last taste found not seldom, an apparent anomaly, in silent, brooding natures might tend to withdraw him from his art. He has left a trace of his love for music in his pictures of 'Concerts' and of 'Pastorals, in which musical performances are made prominent.
No one now, except the literary historian or the student of versification, is ever likely to consult the "Pastorals" or "Windsor Forest;" and men will, in all probability, continue to quote "Hope springs eternal in the human breast" and "A little learning is a dangerous thing," without the least suspicion that the one comes from the seldom-read "Essay on Criticism" and the other from the equally seldom-read "Essay on Man."
I was charmed with this prospect, and having heard what friends Mr. Pope acquired by his pastorals, set about a work of that kind, and in less than six weeks composed as many eclogues, which I forthwith offered to an eminent bookseller, who desired me to leave them for his perusal, and he would give an answer in two days.
I can understand the political cataclysms which have convulsed society for the last thousand years; I can understand the communes, the pastorals, the Jacquerie, the maillotins, the Saint Bartholomew, the League, the Fronde, the dragonnades, the Revolution; I can understand the 14th of July, the 5th and 6th of October, the 20th of June, the 10th of August, the 2d and 3d of September, the 21st of January, the 31st of May, the 30th of October, and the 9th Thermidor; I can understand the egregious torch of civil wars, which inflames instead of soothing the blood; I can understand the tidal wave of revolution, sweeping on with its flux, that nothing can arrest, and its reflux, which carries with it the ruins of the institution which it has itself shattered.
I was quite willing to fall in with this plan, but I determined, privately, only to become acquainted with poets of a peaceable kind who wrote pastorals or elegies and went out for long, solitary walks to commune with nature.
A large portion of the negro races affect nudity, despising clothing as effeminate; but these are chiefly the more boisterous roving pastorals, who are too lazy either to grow cotton or strip the trees of their bark. Their young women go naked; but the mothers suspend a little tail both before and behind.
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