to employ his swains on topicks of controversy.

The Italians soon transferred pastoral poetry into their own language:
Sannazaro wrote Arcadia in prose and verse: Tasso and Guarini wrote
Favole Boschareccie, or sylvan dramas; and all nations of Europe filled
volumes with Thyrsis and Damon, and Thestylis and Phyllis.

Philips thinks it somewhat strange to conceive "how, in an age so
addicted to the muses, pastoral poetry never comes to be so much as
thought upon." His wonder seems very unseasonable; there had never, from
the time of Spenser, wanted writers to talk occasionally of Arcadia and
Strephon; and half the book, in which he first tried his powers,
consists of dialogues on queen Mary's death, between Tityrus and
Corydon, or Mopsus and Menalcas. A series or book of pastorals, however,
I know not that any one had then lately published.

Not long afterwards, Pope made the first display of his powers in four
pastorals, written in a very different form. Philips had taken Spenser,
and Pope took Virgil for his pattern. Philips endeavoured to be natural,
Pope laboured to be elegant.

Philips was now favoured by Addison, and by Addison's companions, who
were very willing to push him into reputation. The Guardian gave an
account of pastoral, partly critical, and partly historical; in which,
when the merit of the moderns is compared, Tasso and Guarini are
censured for remote thoughts and unnatural refinements; and, upon the
whole, the Italians and French are all excluded from rural poetry; and
the pipe of the pastoral muse is transmitted, by lawful inheritance,
from Theocritus to Virgil, from Virgil to Spenser, and from Spenser to
Philips.

With this inauguration of Philips, his rival Pope was not much
delighted; he, therefore, drew a comparison of Philips's performance
with his own, in which, with an unexampled and unequalled artifice of
irony, though he has himself always the advantage, he gives the
preference to Philips. The design of aggrandizing himself he disguised
with such dexterity, that, though Addison discovered it, Steele was
deceived, and was afraid of displeasing Pope by publishing his paper.
Published, however, it was, (Guardian, 40,) and from that time Pope and
Philips lived in a perpetual reciprocation of malevolence.

In poetical powers, of either praise or satire, there was no proportion
between the combatants; but Philips, though he could not prevail by wit,
hoped to hurt Pope with another weapon,