northern regions. What is reality on the soft Arcadian and Sicilian plains, is all fiction here; and though by reading we may be so familiarized to these imaginary scenes as to acquire a sort of natural taste for them, yet, like the fine fruits of the south, they will never be so far naturalized to the soil, as to flourish without borrowed warmth and forced culture. The justice. of this observation is sufficiently proved, by the ill success of those attempts in the mixed pastoral, where the rude speech and rough manners of our English hinds have been engrafted upon the foreign poetical character of the shepherd swain. This gave occasion to Pope's well known ridicule of Phillips; and it is this incongruity of character which is the foundation of the burlesque in Gay's Shepherd's Week, in which some natural strokes of beautiful simplicity and the real pathetic are designedly paired in so odd a manner with humour and parody, that one is at a loss whether to take it as jest or earnestwhether to laugh or cry. Indeed this

effect is also produced in his two dramatic burlesques, the Beggar's Opera, and What d'ye Call it; for how ludicrous soever the general character of the piece may be, when he comes so near to hanging and shooting in good earnest, the joke ceases; and I have observed the tolling of St. Pulchre's bell received by an audience with as much tragical attention, and sympathetic terror as that in Venice Preserved.

No attempt to naturalize pastoral poetry appears to have succeeded better than Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd: it has a considerable air of reality, and the descrip-t tive parts, in general, are in the genuine taste of beautiful simplicity. Yet the sentiments and manners are far from being entirely proper to the characters; and while some descend so low as to be dis'gustful, others are elevated far beyond nature. The real character of a Scottishor English shepherd is by much too coarse for Poetry. I suspect Ramsay gains a great advantage among us by writing in

the Scotch dialect: this not being famihar to us, and scarcely understood, softens the harsher parts, and gives a kind of foreign air that eludes the critic's severity. Some writers, in aiming at a natural simplicity of sentiment, have sunk into silliness, and have given their characters not only the innocence, but the weakness of a child. In that admirable piece of burlesque criticism, the Bathos of Scriblerus, are some ludicrous instances of puerility of sentiment and expression from Phillips's Pastorals, and, I confess, this fault to me appears palpable in a piece which, by being introduced to notice in the Spectator, is universally known and admired-I mean the pastoral song of Colin and Phoebe.

There is one point in which a pastoral writer of any country may venture to follow nature exactly, and with a minute nicety: this is in the scenery and description. Natural objects are scarcely ever disgusting; and there is no country so unblessed as to be unprovided with an

ample store of beauties, which must ever please in an accurate representation, independently on all fashion or peculiarity of taste. It is unpardonable in a poet to borrow these from any fountain but nature herself, and hereby he will most certainly avoid the mistakes and incongruity of imagery, which they are so apt to fall into who describe from ideas gained by reading rather than observation. The preservation of propriety in this respect is of capital importance in description, since nothing so effectually ruins the beauty of picturesque scenery, as the introduction of any circumstance which tends to falsify it. It awakens the mind. from her dream of fancy, and the "baseless fabric of the vision" instantly vanishes. An ingenious crític has instanced this fault from Milton's Comus, where in the Spirit's address to Sabrina, after very properly wishing,

May thy brimmed waves for this
Their full tribute never miss,
Summer's drought or singed air

Never scorch thy tresses fair,

He adds,

May thy billows roll ashore

The beryl and the golden ore,

And here and there thy banks along -
With groves of myrrh and cinnamon;

which have no propriety when applied to an English river. It gives me pleasure to instance the opposite beauty. Michael Drayton, an old English poet, in a pastoral song entitled Dowsabel, describes his shepherdess in the following comparisons.

Her features all as fresh above,

As is the grasse that grows by Dove,
And lyth as lasse of Kent:
Her skin as soft as Lemster wool,
As white as snow on Peakish Hull,
Or swanne that swims in Trent.

He goes on in the story,

This mayden in a morn betime

Went forth, when May was in her prime,

To get sweet cetywall;

The honey-suckle, the harloeke,

The lily and the lady smocke,

To deck her summer hall.