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 alêtheian*: 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 Of Juniper, 'tis an unwholsome shade: