that the search of nature was as free to him as to Lucretius, who, at his age, explained it according to the principles of Epicurus. In his eighth Eclogue, he has innovated nothing; the former part of it being the complaint and despair of a forsaken lover; the latter, a charm of an enchantress, to renew a lost affection. But the complaint perhaps contains some topics which are above the condition of his persons; and our author seems to have made his herdsmen somewhat too learned for their profession: the charms are also of the same nature; but both were copied from Theocritus, and had received the applause of former ages in their original. There is a kind of rusticity in all those pompous verses; somewhat of a holiday shepherd strutting in his country buskins. The like may be observed both in the "Pollio" and the "Silenus," where the similitudes are drawn from the woods and meadows. They seem to me to represent our poet betwixt a farmer and a courtier, when he left Mantua for Rome, and drest himself in his best habit to appear before his patron, somewhat too fine for the place from whence he came, and yet retaining part of its simplicity. In the ninth Pastoral, he collects some beautiful passages, which were scattered in Theocritus, which he could not insert into any of his former Eclogues, and yet was unwilling they should be lost. In all the rest, he is equal to his Sicilian master, and observes, like him, a just decorum both of the subject and the persons; as particularly in the third Pastoral, where one of his shepherds describes a bowl, or mazer, curiously carved: _In medio duo signa: Conon, et quis fuit alter, Descripsit radio, totum qui gentibus orbem?_ He remembers only the name of Conon, and forgets the other on set purpose. Whether he means Anaximander, or Eudoxus, I dispute not; but he was certainly forgotten, to show his country swain was no great scholar. After all, I must confess, that the boorish dialect of Theocritus has a secret charm in it, which the Roman language cannot imitate, though Virgil has drawn it down as low as possibly he could; as in the _cujum pecus_, and some other words, for which he was so unjustly blamed by the bad critics of his age, who could not see the beauties of that _merum rus_, which the poet described in those expressions. But Theocritus may justly be preferred as the original, without injury to Virgil, who modestly contents himself with the second place, and glories only in being the first who transplanted pastoral into his own country, and brought it there to bear as happily as the cherry-trees which Lucullus brought from Pontus.