ead on which this rule has
been founded is that, according to the customs of modern life, it is
improbable that shepherds should be capable of harmonious numbers, or
delicate sentiments; and therefore, the reader must exalt his ideas of
the pastoral character by carrying his thoughts back to the age in which
the care of herds and flocks was the employment of the wisest and
greatest men. These reasoners seem to have been led into their
hypothesis by considering pastoral, not in general, as a representation
of rural nature, and consequently as exhibiting the ideas and sentiments
of those, whoever they are, to whom the country affords pleasure or
employment, but simply as a dialogue or narrative of men actually
tending sheep, and busied in the lowest and most laborious offices; from
whence they very readily concluded, since characters must necessarily be
preserved, that either the sentiments must sink to the level of the
speakers, or the speakers must be raised to the height of the
sentiments. In consequence of these original errors, a thousand precepts
have been given, which have only contributed to perplex and
confound.--JOHNSON.]

[Footnote 6: Rapin, Reflex. sur l'Art. Poet. d'Arist., P. ii. Refl.
xxvii.--POPE.]

[Footnote 7: Pope took this remark from Dr. Knightly Chetwood's Preface
to the Pastorals in Dryden's Virgil: "Not only the sentences should be
short and smart, but the whole piece should be so too, for poetry and
pastime was not the business of men's lives in those days, but only
their seasonable recreation after necessary hours." The rule is purely
fanciful. By continuing the same subject from week to week, a shepherd
could as easily find leisure to compose a single piece of a thousand
lines as ten pieces of a hundred lines each. Most of the laws of
pastoral poetry which Pope has collected are equally unfounded.]

[Footnote 8: Pref. to Virg. Past. in Dryd. Virg.--POPE.]

[Footnote 9: Fontenelle's Disc. of Pastorals.--POPE.]

[Footnote 10: See the forementioned Preface.--POPE.]

[Footnote 11: [Greek: THERISTAI], Idyl. x. and [Greek: ALIEIS], Idyl.
xxi.--POPE.

Pope's definition of Pastoral is too confined. In fact, his Pastoral
Discourse seems made to fit _his_ Pastorals. For the same reason he
would not class as a true Pastoral the most interesting of all Virgil's
Eclogues,--I mean the first, which is founded on fact, which has the
most tender and touching strokes of nature, and the plot of which is
e