Page:The Dunciad - Alexander Pope (1743).djvu/251

220

Designed to have troubled the reader with no farther discourse of Pastoral; but being informed that I am taxed of partiality, in not mentioning an author whose Eclogues are published in the same volume with Mr. Philips's; I shall employ this paper in observations upon him, written in the free spirit of criticism, and without any apprehension of offending that gentleman, whose character it is, that he takes the greatest care of his works before they are published, and has the least concern for them afterwards.

I have laid it down as the first rule of Pastoral, that its idea should be taken from the manners of the Golden Age, and the moral form'd upon the representation of innocence; 'tis therefore plain that any deviations from that design degrade a poem from being truly pastoral. In this view it will appear that Virgil can only have two of his Eclogues allowed to be such: his first and ninth must be rejected, because they describe the ravages of armies, and oppressions of the innocent; Corydon's criminal passion for Alexis throws out the second; the calumny and railing in the third are not proper to that state of concord; the eighth represents unlawful ways of procuring love by inchantments, and introduces a shepherd whom an inviting precipice tempts to self-murder: As to the fourth, sixth, and tenth, they are given up by Heinsius, Salmasius, Rapin, and the critics in general. They likewise observe that but eleven