Sir William Trumbull, Dr. Garth, Lord Halifax, Lord
Somers, Mr. Mainwaring, and others. All these gave our author the
greatest encouragement, and particularly Mr. Walsh, whom Mr. Dryden, in
his postscript to Virgil, calls the best critic of his age. "The
author," says he, "seems to have a particular genius for this kind of
poetry, and a judgment that much exceeds his years. He has taken very
freely from the ancients. But what he has mixed of his own with theirs
is no way inferior to what he has taken from them. It is not flattery at
all to say that Virgil had written nothing so good at his age. His
preface is very judicious and learned." Letter to Mr. Wycherley, Ap.
1705. The Lord Lansdowne, about the same time, mentioning the youth of
our poet, says, in a printed letter of the character of Mr. Wycherley,
that "if he goes on as he hath begun in the pastoral way, as Virgil
first tried his strength, we may hope to see English poetry vie with the
Roman." Notwithstanding the early time of their production, the author
esteemed these as the most correct in the versification, and musical in
the numbers, of all his works. The reason for his labouring them into so
much softness, was, doubtless, that this sort of poetry derives almost
its whole beauty from a natural ease of thought and smoothness of verse:
whereas that of most other kinds consist in the strength and fulness of
both. In a letter of his to Mr. Walsh about this time, we find an
enumeration of several niceties in versification, which perhaps have
never been strictly observed in any English poem, except in these
Pastorals. They were not printed till 1709.--POPE.

The sycophancy of A. Philips, who had prejudiced Mr. Addison against
Pope, occasioned those papers[1] in the Guardian, written by the latter,
in which there is an ironical preference given to the Pastorals of
Philips above his own, in order to support the profound judgment of
those who could not distinguish between the rural and the rustic, and on
that account condemned the Pastorals of Pope for wanting simplicity.
These papers were sent by an unknown hand to Steele, and the irony
escaping him, he communicated them to Mr. Pope, declaring he would never
publish any paper where one of the club was complimented at the expense
of another. Pope told him he was too delicate, and insisted that the
papers should be published in the Guardian. They were so. And the
pleasantry escaped all but Addison, who, taking Pope a