Gentle Shepherd are all framed by the hand of one evidently well acquainted with rural life and manners. They are not the puling, sickly, and unimpressive phantoms that people the bowers of Italian pastoral; they are lively, stirring creatures, bearing in their countenances the hardy lineaments of the country, and expressing themselves with a plainness, and downright sincerity, with which every mind sympathizes. They are rustics, it is true, but they are polished, not only by their proximity to the metropolis, but by the influence of the principal shepherd, who, besides the gentility of blood that operates in his veins, ----also reads and speaks, With them that kens them, Latin words and Greeks. The situations in which the persons are placed are so ingeniously devised, as to draw forth from their bosoms all those feelings and passions which accompany the shepherd, life, and which are described with a happiness and a simplicity, the truer to nature, on account of its being removed from that over-wrought outrageousness of passion which we sometimes think is the fault of modern writing. The tenderness of correspondent affections,--the hesitation and anxiety of a timid lover,--the mutual bliss on the mutual discovery of long concealed attachment,--the uneasiness of jealousy, with the humorous and condign punishment of its evil devices,--the fidelity of the shepherd notwithstanding his elevation to an unexpected rank,--the general happiness that crowns, and winds up the whole, are all impressively and vividly delineated.