ripe and purple vineyard, and the other fox
treading down the grapes whilst he continues at his work. Add to these
circumstances the wild and beautiful Sicilian scenery, and where can
there be found more perfect landscapes in the works, which these
pictures peculiarly resemble, of Vernet or Gainsborough? Considered in
this view, how rich, wild, and various are the landscapes of the old
Sicilian, and we cannot but wonder that so many striking and original
traits should be passed over by a "youthful bard," who professed to
select from, and to copy the ancients.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 14: He refines indeed so much, as to make him, on this very
account, much inferior to the beautiful simplicity of his
original.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 15: It is difficult to conceive where is the "wonderful
variety" in Virgil's Eclogues which "the Greek was a stranger to." Many
of the more poetical parts of Virgil are copied literally from
Theocritus; but are weakened by being made more general, and often lose
much of their picturesque and poetical effect from that
circumstance.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 16: Rapin. Refl. on Arist., P. ii. Refl. xxvii. Pref. to the
Ecl. in Dryden's Virgil.--POPE.]

[Footnote 17: The Aminta of Tasso is here erroneously mentioned by Pope
as the very first pastoral comedy that appeared in Italy. But it is
certain that Il Sacrificio of Agostino Beccari was the first, who boasts
of it in his prologue, and who died very old in 1590.--WARTON.

"There were," says Roscoe, "several writers of pastoral in Italy prior
to those mentioned either by Pope or Warton." Roscoe mistook the
question, which was, who was the first author of the pastoral _drama_?
None of the prior pastoral writers he enumerates produced a drama, and
Warton was right in giving the precedency to Beccari.]

[Footnote 18: Dedication to Virg. Ecl.--POPE.]

[Footnote 19: In the manuscript Pope had added, "Some of them contain
two hundred lines, and others considerably exceed that number."]

[Footnote 20: Johnson remarks that while the notion that rustic
characters ought to use rustic phraseology, led to the adoption in
pastorals "of a mangled dialect which no human being ever could have
spoken," the authors had the inconsistency to invest their personages
with a refinement of thought which was incompatible with coarse and
vulgar diction. "Spenser," he continues, "begins one of his pastorals
with studied barbarity:

Diggon Davie, I bid her good day;