The details in the Latin pastoral poetry are also freely transferred to descriptions of English scenes. The poet could not describe English meadows without a desire to transplant therein some fairer blooms from “the unenvious fields of Greece and Rome.” English rivers, skies, seas, plains, hills, and valleys were presided over by classic deities. Ceres, Pomona, and Bacchus, Dryads and Naiads, were as omnipotent as if they were still believed in. The hardy English shepherd was transformed into a languid swain eternally seeking mossy caves as a refuge against burning heats. His chief occupation was to lie beside some murmuring rill, or beneath some spreading beech, or under some myrtle hedge, and charm the listening vale with love ditties played on his pipe: or, for variety, to enter into some amoebean contest with a neighboring swain concerning the rival beauty of their respective nymphs. His chief troubles were the coyness, fickleness, and desertion of this same much-praised Phyllis or Chloris,[184] and the occasional incursion of nightly predatory wolves among his fleecy flocks. And all this calmly in the face of the fact that there were no predatory animals in English forests, that the chief enemies of the English shepherd were cold and storm, and that he would be much more likely to seek a sunny bank than a cooling grot. The classical English poets not only knew nothing of the genuine English shepherd such as Wordsworth’s Michael, but they did not wish to know of him. It was their ambition to follow in the path marked out by the Mantuan swain. If they could write so that every line would “confess Virgil”[185] they were satisfied. Pope said that it was the poet’s office to represent shepherds not as they are but as they may be conceived to have been in some past golden age.[186] That golden age existed apparently in the Italy of Virgil and the Greece of Theocritus. Dryden gave the acceptable advice, For guides take Virgil and read Theocrite. By them alone you’ll easily comprehend How poets, without shame, may condescend To sing of gardens, fields, of flowers, and fruit, To stir up shepherds, and to tune the flute.[187] Except in burlesque no poet of that day cared to change “Strephon and Phyllis” into “Tom and Bess.” The great effort was to dignify humble themes by constant reference to the great poems of the past. The general structure of many English poems was evidently conformed to Latin models. A comparison of the “Pastorals” of Pope, Gay, and Ambrose Philips with Virgil’s “Eclogues” would sufficiently establish this point.[188] Throughout the classical poetry of Nature there is little reliance on first-hand observation. There was safety and dignity in following Dick Minim’s advice, “When you sit down to write think what your favorite author would say under such and such circumstances,” and the favorite authors were sure to be Virgil, and Horace, and Ovid.