For what can be more Rustical, than to design those Goats for Alexis, at that very time when he believes Thestylis’s winning importunity will be able to prevail? yet there is nothing Clownish in the words. In short, Bucolicks should deserve that commendation which Tully gives Crassus, of whose Orations he would say, that nothing could be more free from childish painting, and affected finery. So let the Expression in Pastoral be without gawdy trappings, and all those little fineries of Art, which are us’d to set off and varnish a discourse: But let an ingenuous Simplicity. and unaffected pleasing Neatness appear in every part; which yet will be flat, if ’t is drawn out to any length, if not close, short, and broken, as that in Virgil,
He that loves Bavius Verses, hates not Thine:
And in the same Eclogue,
—It is not safe to drive too nigh,
The Bank may fail, the Ram is hardly dry:
And in Corydon,
To learn this Art what won’t Amyntas do?
And in Theocritus much of the same nature may be seen; as in his other Pastoral Idylliums, so chiefly in his fifth. Thus Battus in the fourth Idyllium, complaining for the loss of Amaryllis,
Dear Nymph, dear as my Goats, you dy’d.
And how soft and tender is that in the third Idyllium,
And she may look on me, she may be won,
She may be kind, she is not perfect Stone,