A SHEPHERD in Theocritus wishes with much tenderness and elegance, both which must suffer in a literal translation, "Would "I could become a murmuring bee, fly into your grotto, and be permitted to creep a mong the leaves of ivy and fern that com pose the chaplet which adorns your head*." POPE has thus altered this image, Oh! were I made by fome transforming pow'r, On three accounts the former image is preferable to the latter: for the pastoral wildness, the delicacy, and the uncommonness of the thought, I cannot forbear adding, that the riddle of the Royal Oak, in the first Pastoral, invented in imitation of the Virgilian ænigmas in the third eclogue, favours of pun, and puerile conceit. Αιθε γενοίμαν A Η βομβευσα μέλισσα, κι ἐς τεον ανρον ἐκοιμαν, Τον κισσον διαδύς, και ταν πλεριν ὁ τυ πυκασθη. Idyll. ii. 12. + Paft. ii. 45. Say Say, Daphnis, fay in what glad foil appears With what propriety could the tree, whose fhade protected the king, be faid to be lific of princes? pro THAT POPE has not equalled Theocritus, will indeed appear less surprising, if we reflect, that no original writer ever remained fo unrivalled by fucceeding copyifts, as this Sicilian mafter. If it should be objected, that the barrenness of invention imputed to POPE from a view of his PASTORALS, is equally imputable to the Bucolics of Virgil, it may be answered, that whatever may be determined of the rest, yet the first and last Eclogues of Virgil are indifputable proofs of true genius, and power of fancy. The influence of war on the tranquility of rural life, rendered the subject of the first new, and interesting: its compofition is truly dramatic; and the characters of of its two fhepherds are well fupported, and happily contrafted; and the laft has expreffively painted the changeful refolutions, the wild wishes, the paffionate and abrupt exclamations, of a disappointed and despairing lover. UPON the whole, the principal merit of the PASTORALS of POPE confifts, in their correct and mufical verfification; mufical, to a degree of which rhyme could hardly be thought capable: and in giving the first specimen of that harmony in English verse, which is now become indifpenfibly neceffarys and which has fo forcibly and univerfally influenced the public ear, as to have rendered every moderate rhymer melodious, POPE lengthened the abruptness of Waller, and at the fame time contracted the exuberance of Dryden. I REMEMBER to have been informed, by an intimate friend of POPE, that he had once laid a defign. of writing AMERICAN ECLOGUES: ECLOGUES: The fubject would have been fruitful of the most poetical imagery; and, if properly executed, would have rescued the author from the accufation here urged, of having written Eclogues without invention.. OUR author, who had received an early tincture of religion, a reverence for which he` preserved to the laft, was with juftice convinced, that the Scriptures of God contained not only the pureft precepts of morality but the most elevated and fublime strokes of genuine poefy; ftrokes, as much fuperior to any thing Heathenifm can produce, as is Jehovah to Jupiter. This is the cafe more particularly in the exalted prophesy of Isaiah, which POPE has fo fuccessfully verfified in an Eclogue, that inconteftably furpaffes the Pollio of Virgil: although perhaps the dignity, the energy, and the fimplicity of the original are in a few paffages weakened and diminished by florid epithets, and ufeless circumlocutions. See nature haftes her earlieft wreaths to bring, are lines, which have too much prettiness, and too modern an air. The judicious addition of circumftances and adjuncts is what renders poefy a more lively imitation of nature than profe. PoE has been happy in introducing the following circumstance: the prophet fays, "The parched ground shall "become a pool;" Our author expreffes this idea by faying, that the shepherd, fhall START amid the thirfty wild to hear New falls of water murmuring in his ear +. A ftriking example of a fimilar beauty may be added from Thompson. Melifander, in the Tragedy of AGAMEMNON, after telling us he was conveyed in a veffel, at mid-night to the wildeft of the Cyclades, adds, when the pitiless mariners had left him in that readful folitude, I never heard A found fo difmal as their parting oars! * MESS. V. 23. + v. 70. ON |