Note 7 — PASTORAL POETRY.[1]

Pope took this remark from Dr. Knightly Chetwood's Preface to the Pastorals in Dryden's Virgil: "Not only the sentences should be short and smart, but the whole piece should be so too, for poetry and pastime was not the business of men's lives in those days, but only their seasonable recreation after necessary hours." The rule is purely fanciful. By continuing the same subject from week to week, a shepherd could as easily find leisure to compose a single piece of a thousand lines as ten pieces of a hundred lines each. Most of the laws of pastoral poetry which Pope has collected are equally unfounded.