and Pastoral Muse, as Quintilian phraseth it, not only is affraid to appear in the Forum, but the City, and for the very same thing an Alexandrian flouts the Syracucusian Weomen in the Fifteenth Idyllium of Theocritus, for when they, being then in the City, spoke the Dorick Dialect, the delicate Citizen could not endure it, and found fault with their distastful, as he thought, pronunciation:  and his reflection was very smart.

  Like Pidgeons you have mouths from Ear to Ear.

So intolerable did that broad way of pronunciation, tho exactly fit for a Clowns discourse, seem to a Citizen:  and hence Probus observes that ’twas much harder for the Latines to write Pastorals than for the Greeks; because the Latines had not some Dialects peculiar to the Country, and others to the City, as the Greeks had; Besides the Latine Language, as Quintilian hath observ’d, is not capable of the neatness which is necessary to Bucolicks, no, that is the peculiar priviledge of the Greeks:  We cannot, says he, be so low, they exceed us in subtlety, and in propriety they are at more certainty than We:  and again, in pat and close Expressions we cannot reach the Greeks:  And, if we believe Tully, Greek is much more fit for Ornament than Latin for it hath much more of that neatness, {37} and ravishing delightfulness, which Bucolicks necessarily require.

Yet of Pastoral, with whose Nature we are not very well acquainted, what that Form is which the Greeks call the Character, is not very easy to determine; yet that we may come to some certainty, we must stick to our former observation, viz. that Pastoral belongs properly to the Golden Age:  For as Tully in his Treatise de Oratore says, in all our disputes the Subject is to be measur’d by the most perfect of that kind, and Synesius in his Encomium on Baldness hints the very same, when he tells us that Poetry fashions its subject as Men imagine it should be, and not as really it is:  pros doxan, ou pros aletheian:  Now the Life of a Shepherd, that it might be rais’d to the highest perfection, is to be referr’d to the manners and age of the world whilst yet innocent, and such as the Fables have describ’d it:  And as Simplicity was the principal vertue of that Age, so it ought to be the peculiar Grace, and as it were Character of Bucolicks:  in which the Fable, Manners, Thought, and Expression ought to be full of the most innocent simplicity imaginable:  for as Innocence in Life, so purity and simplicity in discourse was the Glory of that Age:  So as gravity to Epicks, Sweetness to Lyricks, Humor to Comedy, softness to Elegies and smartness to Epigrams, so simplicity to Pastorals is proper; and one upon Theocritus says, that the Idea of his Bucolicks is in every part pure, and in all {38} that belongs to simplicity very happy:  Such is this of Virgil, unwholsome to us Singers is the shade