of Trumbull; they had been
handed about in manuscript; Wycherley, as already noticed, had shown
them to Walsh, himself an offender of the same class. Granville,
afterwards Lord Lansdowne, another small poet, read them, and professed
to see in Pope another Virgil; whilst Congreve, Garth, Somers, Halifax,
and other men of weight, condescended to read, admire, and criticize.
Old Tonson, who had published for Dryden, wrote a polite note to Pope,
then only seventeen, saying that he had seen one of the Pastorals in
the hands of Congreve and Walsh, "which was extremely fine," and
requesting the honour of printing it. Three years afterwards it
accordingly appeared in Tonson's Miscellany, a kind of annual, of which
the first numbers had been edited by Dryden. Such miscellanies more or
less discharged the function of a modern magazine. The plan, said Pope
to Wycherley, is very useful to the poets, "who, like other thieves,
escape by getting into a crowd." The volume contained contributions from
Buckingham, Garth, and Howe; it closed with Pope's Pastorals, and opened
with another set of pastorals by Ambrose Philips--a combination which,
as we shall see, led to one of Pope's first quarrels.

The Pastorals have been seriously criticized; but they are, in truth,
mere school-boy exercises; they represent nothing more than so many
experiments in versification. The pastoral form had doubtless been used
in earlier hands to embody true poetic feeling; but in Pope's time it
had become hopelessly threadbare. The fine gentlemen in wigs and laced
coats amused themselves by writing about nymphs and "conscious swains,"
by way of asserting their claims to elegance of taste. Pope, as a boy,
took the matter seriously, and always retained a natural fondness for a
juvenile performance upon which he had expended great labour, and which
was the chief proof of his extreme precocity. He invites attention to
his own merits, and claims especially the virtue of propriety. He does
not, he tells us, like some other people, make his roses and daffodils
bloom in the same season, and cause his nightingales to sing in
November; and he takes particular credit for having remembered that
there were no wolves in England, and having accordingly excised a
passage in which Alexis prophesied that those animals would grow milder
as they listened to the strains of his favourite nymph. When a man has
got so far as to bring to England all the pagan deities, and rival
shephe