The influence of Rapin on the development of the pastoral, nevertheless, was salutary.  Finding the genre vitiated with wit, extravagance, and artificiality, he attempted to strip it of these Renaissance excrescencies and restore it to its pristine purity by direct reference to the Ancients—­Virgil, in particular.  Though Rapin does not have the psychological insight into the esthetic principles of the genre equal to that recently exhibited by William Empson or even to that expressed by Fontenelle, he does understand the intrinsic appeal of the pastoral which has enabled it to survive, and often to flourish, through the centuries in painting, music, and poetry.  Perhaps his most explicit expression of this appreciation is made while he is discussing Horace’s statement that the muses love the country: 
  And to speak from the very bottome of my heart... methinks he
  is much more happy in a Wood, that at ease contemplates this
  universe, as his own, and in it, the Sun and Stars, the
  pleasing Meadows, shady Groves, green Banks, stately Trees,
  flowing Springs, and the wanton windings of a River, fit
  objects for quiet innocence, than he that with Fire and Sword
  disturbs the World, and measures his possessions by the wast
  that lys about him (p. 4).

Rene Rapin (1621-1687), in spite of his duties as a Jesuit priest and disputes with the Jansenists, became one of the most widely read men of his time and carried on the celebrated discussions about the Ancients with Maimbourg and Vavasseur.  His chef-d’oeuvre without contradiction is Hortorum libri IV.  Like Virgil, Spenser, Pope, and many aspiring lesser poets, he began his literary career by writing pastorals, Eclogae Sacrae (1659), to which is prefixed in Latin the original of “A Treatise de Carmine Pastorali.”

 J.E.  Congleton
   University of Florida

Reprinted here from the copy owned by the Boston Athenaeum by permission.

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A

TREATISE

de CARMINE PASTORALI

Written by RAPIN.

The First Part.

To be as short as possible in my discourse upon the present Subject, I shall not touch upon the Excellency of Poetry in general; nor repeat those high Encomiums, (as that tis the most divine of all human Arts, and the like) which Plato in his Jone, Aristotele in his Poetica, and other Learned men have copiously insisted on:  And this I do that I might more closely and briefly pursue my present design, which, no doubt will not please every man; for since I treat of that part of Poetry, which (to use Quintilian’s words,) by reason of its Clownishness, is affraid of the Court and City; some may imagine that I follow Nichocaris his humor, who would paint only the most ugly and deform’d, and those too in the meanest and most frightful dress, that real, or fancy’d Poverty could put them in.