it when it would have
imposed the fetters of an absurd mannerism upon the 'machinery' and the
'atmosphere' of his pastoral. The last decades of the seventeenth, and
the first two or three of the eighteenth centuries, were periods when
pastoral poetry was in fashion. Italian and French literary modes were
supreme. Modern pastoral may be said to have taken its rise in the
_Admetus_ of Boccaccio; in the introductory act of the _Orfeo_ of
Politian, written in 1475, and termed _Pastorale_, and in the _Arcadia_
of Jacopo Sanazzara. But, according to Dr. Burney, the first complete
pastoral drama prepared for the stage was the _Sacrificio Favola
Pastorale_ of Agostino de Beccari, afterwards published in _Il Parnasso
Italiano_. They followed the _Aminta_ of Tasso and the _Filli di Sciro_
of Bonarelli in the beginning of the seventeenth century. In Italy and
France, thereafter, pastoral became the literary mode for the time
being; to Clement Marot, with his _Complaint of Louise of Savoy_,
belonging the honour, as Professor Morley says, of producing the first
French pastoral. It invaded all the fine arts,--music, painting,
sculpture, romance, were all in turn conquered by it. From France it
spread to England and to Scotland, and thereafter a flood of shepherds
and shepherdesses, of Strephons and Chloes, of Damons, Phyllises, and
Delias, spread over literature, of which the evidences in England are
Spenser's _Shepherds' Calendar_, Sidney's _Arcadia_; and in Scotland,
Robert Henryson's _Robene and Makyne_. Nor did Milton disdain this form
for his _Lycidas_; Pope also affected it, as well as Ambrose Philips;
while, under the title of _The Shepherd's Week_, Gay produced one of the
most charming of his many charming works, in which our age, by
consigning them to oblivion, has deliberately deprived itself of genuine
poetic enjoyment. To the extent of the name, and of that only, was
Ramsay influenced by his time. As regards all else he struck out a new
line altogether.

With regard to the _locale_ where Ramsay laid the scene of the drama,
two places have laid claim to it; the first, and the least probable,
being situate near Glencorse, about seven miles from Edinburgh; the
second, one and a half miles from the village of Carlops, about twelve
miles distant from the metropolis, and five farther on from the
first-mentioned spot. The balance of probability lies strongly in favour
of the Carlops 'scene.' In the first named, only the waterfal