Pastoral admits of all ranks of persons, because persons of all ranks inhabit the country. It excludes not, therefore, on account of the characters necessary to be introduced, any elevation or delicacy of sentiment; those ideas only are improper, which, not owing their original to rural objects, are not pastoral. Such is the exclamation in Virgil, _Nunc scio quid sit Amor, duris in cotibus illum_ _Ismarus, aut Rhodope, aut extremi Garamantes,_ _Nec generis nostri puerum, nee sanguinis edunt._ VIRG. Ecl. viii. 44. I know thee, Love, in deserts thou wert bred, And at the dugs of savage tygers fed; Alien of birth, usurper of the plains. DRYDEN. which, Pope endeavouring to copy, was carried to still greater impropriety: I know thee, Love, wild as the raging main, More fierce than tygers on the Libyan plain; Thou wert from Ætna's burning entrails torn; Begot in tempests, and in thunders born! Sentiments like these, as they have no ground in nature, are indeed of little value in any poem; but in pastoral they are particularly liable to censure, because it wants that exaltation above common life, which in tragick or heroick writings often reconciles us to bold flights and daring figures. Pastoral being the _representation of an action or passion, by its effects upon a country life_, has nothing peculiar but its confinement to rural imagery, without which it ceases to be pastoral. This is its true characteristick, and this it cannot lose by any dignity of sentiment, or beauty of diction. The Pollio of Virgil, with all its elevation, is a composition truly bucolick, though rejected by the criticks; for all the images are either taken from the country, or from the religion of the age common to all parts of the empire. The Silenus is indeed of a more disputable kind, because, though the scene lies in the country, the song being religious and historical, had been no less adapted to any other audience or place. Neither can it well be defended as a fiction; for the introduction of a god seems to imply the golden age, and yet he alludes to many subsequent transactions, and mentions Gallus, the poet's contemporary.