of sorted flowers in our gardens: and we are much more transported with the beauty of the heavens, and admiration of their Creator, in a clear night, when we behold stars of all magnitudes promiscuously moving together, than if those glorious lights were ranked in their several orders, or reduced into the finest geometrical figures. Another rule omitted by P. Rapin, as some of his are by me, (for I do not design an entire treatise in this preface,) is, that not only the sentences should be short and smart, (upon which account he justly blames the Italian and French, as too talkative,) but that the whole piece should be so too. Virgil transgressed this rule in his first Pastorals, (I mean those which he composed at Mantua,) but rectified the fault in his riper years. This appears by the _Culex_, which is as long as five of his Pastorals put together. The greater part of those he finished have less than a hundred verses; and but two of them exceed that number. But the "Silenus," which he seems to have designed for his master-piece, in which he introduces a god singing, and he, too, full of inspiration, (which is intended by that ebriety, which M. Fontenelle so unreasonably ridicules,) though it go through so vast a field of matter, and comprises the mythology of near two thousand years, consists but of fifty lines; so that its brevity is no less admirable, than the subject matter, the noble fashion of handling it, and the deity speaking. Virgil keeps up his characters in this respect too, with the strictest decency: for poetry and pastime was not the business of men's lives in those days, but only their seasonable recreation after necessary labours. And therefore the length of some of the modern Italian and English compositions is against the rules of this kind of poesy. I shall add something very briefly, touching the versification of Pastorals, though it be a mortifying consideration to the moderns. Heroic verse, as it is commonly called, was used by the Greeks in this sort of poem, as very ancient and natural; lyrics, iambics, &c. being invented afterwards: but there is so great a difference in the numbers of which it may be compounded, that it may pass rather for a genus, than species, of verse. Whosoever shall compare the numbers of the three following verses, will quickly be sensible of the truth of this observation: _Tityre, tu patulæ recubans sub tegmine fagi_-- the first of the Georgics, _Quid faciat lætas segetes, quo sidere terram_-- and of the Æneïs, _Arma, virumque cano, Trojæ qui primus ab oris._