ad
lost its hold on the imagination, and even if Englishmen in the
eighteenth century could have been beguiled by the dream, they could not
at least have been enthralled by the fiction, that Paradise was renewed
in England under the auspices of heathenism. The theory of a golden age
introduced a second inconsistency into the Pastorals without remedying
the first. Bad as is the defence, it cannot be pleaded on Pope's behalf;
for discarding in his Winter the notion of some remote and undefined
era, he has laid the scene in a particular year of the reign of Queen
Anne, and makes Lycidas declare that he will often sacrifice a lamb to
the deceased Mrs. Tempest, who died in 1703. There are several other
incongruities. "Zodiac" is too hard a term to be remembered correctly by
one of Pope's shepherds, a circumstance which is intended to denote the
little learning he possessed; and the same ignorant shepherd proceeds to
talk as glibly of Hybla, and Cynthus, and Idalia'a groves as if they had
been neighbouring parishes.

One characteristic of the Pastorals has been universally allowed--the
peculiar softness of the versification, which was considered by Pope to
be an essential quality of this species of composition. He told Spence
that he had scarce ever bestowed more labour in tuning his lines.[15] He
must have had less facility when he was learning the art than when he
was thoroughly practised in it; and since authors are apt to estimate
the result by the amount of toil it has cost them, the greater pains he
expended upon his early efforts may have been the reason that "he
esteemed the Pastorals as the most correct in the versification, and
musical in the numbers, of all his works." He certainly went forwards in
some of his later pieces. Windsor Forest, and the Epistle of Eloisa to
Abelard, are finer specimens of melody than the Pastorals. The poetic
harmony displayed by Pope in his youth refuted an axiom which Dryden
propounded in his lines to the memory of Oldham.

O early ripe! to thy abundant store
What could advancing age have added more?
It might, what nature never gives the young,
Have taught the smoothness of thy native tongue.
But satire needs not this, and wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.

Many examples might be quoted in support of Dryden's position, but he
had failed to discover, what the later history of poetry has rendered
clear, that where there is not a defect