Spirero nobil sensi a’ rozzi petti,
    Raddolciro nelle lor lingue il suono,
    Perche, ovunque i’ mi sia, io sono Amore,
    Ne’ pastori non men, che negli eroi;
    E la disagguaglianza de’ soggetti,
    Come a me piace, agguaglio.

This served, of course, no other purpose than to salve the author’s artistic conscience, since it is perfectly evident that the polished civility of his characters belongs to them by nature, and is not in any way an external importation.  The remark, however, is interesting in respect of the philosophy of love as a civilizing power, which we have seen constantly recurring from the days of Boccaccio onward.  Ben Jonson expressed himself sharply on this subject, with respect to Guarini and Sidney, in his conversations with Drummond.  ’That Guarini, in his Pastor Fido, keept not decorum, in making Shepherds speek as well as himself could....  That Sidney did not keep a decorum in making everyone speak as well as himself.’[359] The critical foundation of these censures in an a priori definition of pastoral is obvious, and they are more interesting for their authorship than for their intrinsic merit.  It would be curious to know how Jonson defended such a character as his Sad Shepherd—­but his views had time to alter.

It is to the critics of the late years of the seventeenth century and early ones of the eighteenth that we owe the attempt to formulate a theory of pastoral composition.  The attempt has not for us any great importance.  All the work we have been considering had appeared, and the vast majority of it had passed into oblivion, before the French critics first engaged upon the task.  Nor has the attempt much intrinsic interest.  The theories of individual writers such as those already mentioned are of value, as showing the critical mood in which they themselves created; but these, and still more the theories of pure critics, are of no importance, either in the field of abstract critical theory or of historical inquiry.  Fontenelle, offended at the odour of Theocritus’ hines, Rapin, with his Jesuitical prudicity and ethico-literary theories of propriety, are not the kind of thinkers to advance critical and historical science.  Yet it was to their school that the far greater English critics of the early eighteenth century belonged.  Their work consists for the most part of various combinations of a priori definition and arbitrary rules, based on the notion of propriety.  Thus Pope in the Discourse on Pastoral, prefixed to his eclogues in 1717, writes:  ’A pastoral is an imitation of the action of a shepherd, or one considered under that character....  If we would copy nature, it may be useful to take this idea along with us, that pastoral is an image of what they call the golden age.  So that we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to have been, when the best of men followed the