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Had the mania been confined to such as these, it would not have been of much consequence; but there were many poets real poets who suffered themselves to be drawn away by it; or, perhaps, we should rather say, who were themselves the originators of it. Thomson, the delightful poet of the Seasons, seduced by the prevailing fashion, wrote pastorals.* Lord Lyttleton, the generous and amiable friend of Thomson, wrote pastorals. Pope, (though 't was, it is true, at the age of sixteen,) wrote pastorals. Collins, Gay, Warton, wrote pastorals. And Shenstone, of whom it was said, in the Marquis of Ermenonville's famous epitaph :

'BENEATH this plain stone

Lies WILLIAM SHENSTONE;
A poet rural

Who wrote of things natural,'

too often veiled his things natüral under such a mass of artificial (i. e. pastoral) imagery, as almost entirely to destroy their charm.

As if this was not enough, Hannah More, the sensible, the strong-minded, the energetic Hannah More, made her first appearance, in 1762, at the age of seventeen, as the author of a pastoral drama. Yet even at this early age, the benevolent disposition of this admirable woman was visible; for The Search After Happiness,' was written to supply the place of those plays, and portions of plays, too often of a licentious character, wont to be performed by young ladies in boarding-schools. That she did not succeed in her design, was owing to the fact that Hannah More, though born to be the benefactress of her race, was not born a poet.' Her poetry is of the same dull, cold, stately, pompous school as that of her friend and literary admirer, Dr. Johnson. It is deficient the true elements of poetry. It wants fire, energy, imagination, passion. Had she written nothing but verse, she would long ago have been forgotten; but fortunately for the world, she discovered, before it was too late, that prose was her forte. It is in prose that she excels, and on her prose that her fame is built, with a solidity which will withstand the shock of ages.

But what has all this to do with pastoral poetry? we are digressing. Revenons à nos moutons.

One of the most absurd things connected with this species of writing, was the high-flown and ridiculous nomenclature adopted in it. Oh! how our soul loathes the Damons, and Strephons, and Corydons, the Flavias, and Delias, and Sylvias, and Chloes, and Phillises, with which it abounded. In reading any of the poetry of this period, we always look ahead with a jealous eye; and if we spy any of these idiotical names disfiguring the page, we incontinently turn to the next one. The strange incongruity of introducing such names into descriptions of English pastoral life, in conjunction with those of Windsor, Grantham, Thames, &c., does not seem to have struck any one.

I AM aware that, strictly speaking, the 'Seasons' themselves, as well as SHENSTONE'S ' Village School-Mistress,' are Idylls or Pastorals; but they do not belong to the class of which I am speaking. They are natural delineations of Nature: hence their ' never-ending, still-beginning' charin.

The plan of the English pastoral was always much the same, and the theme invariably love. Shepherds lying by the sides of rivers, playing on oaten pipes, or singing in courtly strains, the praises of their mistresses, lamenting or rejoicing, according as hope or despair prevailed; beautiful nymphs, bathing in limpid waters, or reclining under verdant trees; crooks garlanded with flowers, streams standing still to sympathize with human sorrow, skies ever pure and radiant, smiling with perpetual summer; these were the themes, forced and unnatural, cold and heartless, which for so long a time occupied the places which true feeling, genuine passion, and lofty sentiment ought to have held.

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Gay alone, of all the poets of that period, seems to have had a proper idea of what an English pastoral ought to be. His characters are real rustics; and his Shepherd's Week,' though originally written to ridicule the pastorals of a contemporary, is still prized for its correct though somewhat coarse pictures of low country life. He tells us himself, in his address to the reader, that we 'will not find his shepherdesses idly piping on oaten reeds, but milking the kine; or, if the hogs are astray, driving them to their styes. My shepherd,' he continues, gathereth no nosegays but what are the growth of our own fields; he sleepeth not under myrtle shades, but under a hedge; nor doth he vigilantly defend his flock from wolves, because there are none." His picture of the country-ballad singer is, we think, excellent. Bowzybeus, a tipsy ballad-singer, who, we are told,

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'could sweetly sing,

Or with the rosined bow torment the string,'

is found asleep by a troop of country lads and lasses, laughing and romping, as lads and lasses wont to do. With much noise and merriment they call on him to awake and give them a song. One frolicsome damsel steps forward, and

kisses with smacking lips the snoring lout;

another tickles his nose with a straw; and after a while, he awakes, and sings them a succession of songs, well calculated to please such tastes as theirs. The conclusion of this scene is admirably hit off.

'His carols ceased; the listening maids and swains

Seem still to hear some imperfect strains.

Sudden he rose, and as he reels along,

Swears kisses sweet should well reward his song.

The damsels laughing fly the giddy clown

Again upon a wheat-sheaf sinks adown;

The power that guards the drunk his sleep attends,
Till ruddy, like his face, the sun descends.'

Very different from this, however, were the Pastorals of Gay's contemporaries.

Pope wrote four, descriptive of the four seasons. And certainly, when we consider them as the work of a boy of sixteen, we are bound to admire them; but we cannot help exclaiming: Pity he did not choose a better theme.' In the first Pastoral, two shepherds, Daphnis and Strephon, after leading out their flocks on Windsor's

blissful plain,' sit down to compete with each other who shall sing the best song in praise of his mistress, the one staking a lamb, the other a bowl of delicate workmanship; and Damon, another shepherd, is appointed umpire. Strephon then commences thus :

'INSPIRE me, PHŒBUS! in my DELTA's praise,

With WALLER's strains, or GRANVILLE's moving lays!

A milk-white bull shall at your altars stand,

Which threats a fight, and spurns the rising sand.'

The idea of an English peasant offering a sacrifice to Apollo, is too ludicrous. Daphnis answers in the same strain, and the contest continues for some time; till at last Damon exclaims;

'CEASE to contend; for, DAPHNIS, I decree

The bowl to STREPHON, and the lamb to thee.

Blest swains, whose nymphs in every grace excel!
Blest nymphs, whose swains those graces sing so well!'

In Pastoral II., Alexis, 'a shepherd boy,' is heard lamenting the pangs of hopeless love. From the similarity of the name, as well as from the first line of the poem, we suspect the boy-poet himself is here shadowed forth. It begins thus:

'A SHEPHERD's boy, he seeks no better name,
Led forth his flocks along the silver Thame,
Where dancing sunbeams on the waters played
And verdant alders formed a quivering shade.
Soft as he mourned the streams forgot to flow

There! that's enough! that's quite sufficient! mourned, the streams forgot to flow !'

'Soft as he

Lord Lyttleton, the courtly and accomplished Lord Lyttleton, wrote a Pastoral Poem, in four Eclogues, entitled 'The Progress of Love.' It is (it must be owned) a fine poem, and contains some beautiful descriptions; but it differs nothing in character from those already described, and is disfigured by similar incongruities. The hero thus describes his first meeting with the object of his affection :

'WHERE yonder lines conspire to form a shade,
These eyes first gazed upon the charming maid;
There she appeared, on that auspicious day,

When swains their sportive rites to BACCHUS pay.'

This would lead us to think that the scene lay in Thessaly or Arcadia, in ancient times; but on the next page Damon makes her a present of a Canary-bird, and the illusion is at once dispelled.

Shenstone was an English country gentleman, and as such, enjoyed opportunities of observing rural life which were denied to

*For instance:

'ON a romantic mountain's airy head

(While browzing goats at ease around him fed.)
Anxious he lay;

The vale beneath a pleasing prospect yields
-Of verdant meads and cultivated fields;
Through these a river rolls its winding flood,
Adorned with various tufts of rising wood;
Here half concealed in trees a cottage stands,
A castle there the opening plain commands,
Beyond, a town of glittering spires is crowned
And distant hills the wide horizon bound.'

the poets of the court and the city. Yet he does not seem to have improved them; for his Pastoral Poetry differs from that of the rest, only in its being chiefly written in the elegiac strain, and in his being himself the hero of his story,' his Delias, Celias, etc., etc., being his own mistresses, real or imagined.

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It is marked by the same affected sensibility, the same artificial view of nature, the same vapid and uninteresting tameness. With all this, however, Shenstone is a delightful poet, and never failed to please when he chose to array his thoughts in the chaste language of genuine feeling, as in his Village School-mistress,' and his exquisite 'Ode on Rural Elegance.' Nothing can exceed the graceful beauty and unaffected elegance of the latter, from which, though foreign to our subject, we are tempted to make a short extract:

'SEARCH but the garden, or the wood,

Let you admired carnation own

Not all was inade for raiment, or for food,

Not all for needful use alone;

There, while the seeds of future blossoms dwell,

"T is colored for the sight, perfumed to please the smell.

Why knows the nightingale to sing?

Why flows the pine's nectareous juice?

Why shines with paint the linnet's wing?

For sustenance alone? for use?

For preservation? Every sphere

Shall make fair pleasure's rightful claim appear.

And sure there seem, of human-kind,

Some born to shun the solemn strife;

Some for amusive tasks designed,

To soothe the certain ills of life;

Grace its lone vales with many a budding rose,

New founts of bliss disclose,

Call forth refreshing shades, and decorate repose.'

Is not that beautiful, and just, and true? Instances might be multiplied to show the absurdity of the pastoral style, but

'What should you need of more?

Yea, or so many? What need one?'

But there was another species of pastoral poetry, which we must by no means pass over-namely, pastoral songs; the composition, not of real poets, but of that crowd of poetasters who always follow in their wake, and imitate their style, whatever it may be. O! the surpassing insipidity, the inexpressible inanity of those songs, which the fair ladies of the times of George the First and his successor were wont to trill forth, to the accompaniment of the jingling spinet or twanging arch-lute. Here is a fair specimen :

'SAY, have you seen my ARABEL,

The Caledonian maid?

Or heard the youths of Scotia tell
Where ARABEL is strayed?

The damsel is of angel mien,

With sad and downcast eyes;

The shepherds call her Sorrow's Queen,
So pensively she sighs.'

Another of these dulcet ditties treats of a shepherd who retired to a lone vale, and there 'sung his loves, evening and morn :'

'HE sung with so sweet and enchanting a sound,
That sylvans and fairies unseen danced around.'

We could instance others, but by this time the reader is tired, and

so are we.

The sickly glare which had so long lighted the literary world began at length to fade away, and the bright beams of truth and nature once more broke forth with glorious effulgence; and that period commenced, which, for want of a better name, we have styled the Natural; at the head of which stands Cowper, the sweet poet of feeling and religious truth, and Burns, the bard of Nature's own creation. The advent of this era, (which, with a few intermissions, has continued to our own day,) was like the resumption by the human frame of its natural and healthful action, after a long course of powerful and enervating stimulants, to which the vitiated taste and artificial literature of the former ages might not unaptly be compared.

Of the pastoral poetry of the Greeks and Romans we will not presume to speak; with the pastoral poetry of Italy and Germany we are not acquainted; but from the English pastoral poetry of the eighteenth century, O, Apollo! O, Minerva ! O, all ye patrons of good taste and common sense, protect us!

ΙΟΥΔ.

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