tenets, and began with the premise that man is most delighted by the imaginative perception of the states of life for which he would willingly exchange his own.  These are “the busy, great, or pompous” (depicted in tragedy and the epic) and “the retir’d, soft, or easy” (depicted in the pastoral).  From this analysis of “the Nature of the Human Mind,” the characteristics of the true pastoral, such as the avoidance of the hardships and vulgarities of rural life, follow logically.  Similarly, since a minutely drawn description deprives the reader’s fancy of its naturally pleasurable exercise, pastoral descriptions should only set “the Image in the finest Light.”  Rapin, on the other hand, had determined the proper length of descriptions by examining Virgil and Theocritus.  For the association of the pleasure afforded by the pastoral with the natural human delight in ease, Purney was indebted to the essays on the pastoral in The Guardian (see no. 22), from which he borrowed extensively for many of his principles, and to Fontenelle, who constructed his theory of the pastoral upon the premise that all men are dominated “par une certaine paresse.”  By contrast, although Pope adopted Fontenelle’s premise, he tested its validity by relating it to the accepted definition of the genre.

One of Purney’s major purposes in the essay was to dignify the pastoral by demonstrating that it admits all the components generally reserved for tragedy and the epic.  Most critics had considered the pastoral a minor form and consequently had narrowed their attention to a few frequently debated questions, mainly the state of rural life to be depicted and the level of the style to be adopted.  All agreed that the poem should be brief and simple in its fable, characters, and style.  But it was therefore a poetic exercise, no more significant, Purney complained, than a madrigal.  He was intent upon investing the pastoral with all the major poetic elements—­extended, worthy fable; moral; fully-drawn characters; and appropriate expression.  For in his mind the poem best incorporates one of the only two true styles, the tender, and therefore warrants a literary status beneath only tragedy and the epic.

Like his critical method, Purney’s decision that the pastoral should depict contemporary rural life divested of what is vulgar and painful in it, rather than either the life of the Golden Age or true rustic existence places him on the side of Addison, Tickell, Ambrose Philips, and Fontenelle (indeed, his statement is a paraphrase of Fontenelle’s), and in opposition to the school of Rapin, Pope, and Gay, who argued for a portrait of the Golden Age.  Both schools campaigned for a simplicity removed from realistic rusticity (which they detected in Spenser and Theocritus) and refinement (as in Virgil’s eclogues); but to one group the term meant the innocence of those remote from academic learning and social sophistication, and to the other the refined simplicity