Thomas Purney_, ed. H.O. White, Oxford, 1933, p. 111),
although it had been advertised at the conclusion of Purney's second
volume of poetry as shortly to be printed. A copy, probably unique, of
_A Full Enquiry into the True Nature of Pastoral_ (1717) was, however,
recently purchased by the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library of the
University of California, and is here reproduced. Despite the obvious
failure of the essay to influence critical theory, it justifies
attention because it is the most thorough and specific of the remarkably
few studies of the pastoral in an age when many thought it necessary to
imitate Virgil's poetic career, and because it is, in many respects, a
contribution to the more liberal tendencies within neoclassic criticism.
Essentially, the _Full Enquiry_ is a coherent expansion of the random
comments collected in the poet's earlier prefaces.

Purney belongs to the small group of early eighteenth-century
critics who tended to reject the aesthetics based upon authority and
pre-established definitions of the _genres_, and to evolve one logically
from the nature of the human mind and the sources of its enjoyment; in
other words, who turned attention from the objective work of art to the
subjective response. These men, such as Dennis and Addison, were
not searching for an aesthetics of safety, one that would produce
unimpeachable correctness; Purney frequently underscored his preference
for a faulty and irregular work that is alive to a meticulous but dull
one. This is not to be understood as praise of the irregular: the rules
of poetry must be established, but they must be founded rationally on
the ends of poetry, pleasure and profit, and the psychological process
by which they are received, and not solely on the practices and
doctrines of the ancients. Taking his cue from the Hobbesian and Lockian
methodology of Addison's papers of the pleasures of the imagination
without delving into Addison's sensational philosophy, Purney outlined
an extensive critical project to investigate (1) "the Nature and
Constitution of the human Mind, and what Pleasures it is capable
of receiving from Poetry"; (2) the best methods of exciting those
pleasures; (3) the rules whereby these methods may be incorporated into
literary form (_Works_, ed. White, p. 48). It is this pattern of thought
that regulates the _Full Enquiry_. Perhaps more than any other poetic
type, the pastoral of the Restoration and the early eightee