nce peculiar to poetry, but
that whatever poetry they attempted would be of the pastoral kind; would
take its subjects from those scenes of rural simplicity in which they
were conversant, and, as it was the offspring of harmony and nature,
would employ the powers it derived from the former, to celebrate the
beauty and benevolence of the latter.

Accordingly we find that the most ancient poems treat of agriculture,
astronomy, and other objects within the rural and natural systems.

What constitutes the difference between the georgic and the pastoral,
is love and the colloquial or dramatic form of composition peculiar to
the latter; this form of composition is sometimes dispensed with, and
love and rural imagery alone are thought sufficient to distinguish
the pastoral. The tender passion, however, seems to be essential to
this species of poetry, and is hardly ever excluded from those
pieces that were intended to come under this denomination: even in
those eclogues of the Amoebean kind, whose only purport is a trial of
skill between contending shepherds, love has its usual share, and
the praises of their respective mistresses are the general subjects of
the competitors.

It is to be lamented, that scarce any oriental compositions of this kind
have survived the ravages of ignorance, tyranny, and time; we cannot
doubt that many such have been extant, possibly as far down as that
fatal period, never to be mentioned in the world of letters without
horror, when the glorious monuments of human ingenuity perished in the
ashes of the Alexandrian library.

Those ingenious Greeks, whom we call the parents of pastoral poetry,
were, probably, no more than imitators, of imitators that derived their
harmony from higher and remoter sources, and kindled their poetical
fires at those then unextinguished lamps which burned within the tombs
of oriental genius.

It is evident that Homer has availed himself of those magnificent images
and descriptions so frequently to be met with in the books of the Old
Testament; and why may not Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion have found
their archetypes in other eastern writers, whose names have perished
with their works? yet, though it may not be illiberal to admit such a
supposition, it would certainly be invidious to conclude, what the
malignity of cavillers alone could suggest with regard to Homer, that
they destroyed the sources from which they borrowed, and, as it is
fabled of the young of the peli