The work which had procured him the first notice from the publick, was his Six Pastorals, which, flattering the imagination with Arcadian scenes, probably found many readers, and might have long passed as a pleasing amusement, had they not been, unhappily, too much commended.
The rustick poems of Theocritus were so highly valued by the Greeks and Romans, that they attracted the imitation of Virgil, whose eclogues seem to have been considered as precluding all attempts of the same kind; for, no shepherds were taught to sing by any succeeding poet, till Nemesian and Calphurnius ventured their feeble efforts in the lower age of Latin literature.
At the revival of learning in Italy, it was soon discovered, that a dialogue of imaginary swains might be composed with little difficulty; because the conversation of shepherds excludes profound or refined sentiment; and, for images and descriptions, satyrs and fawns, and naiads and dryads, were always within call; and woods and meadows, and hills and rivers, supplied variety of matter, which; having a natural power to sooth the mind, did not quickly cloy it.
Petrarch entertained the learned men of his age with the novelty of modern pastorals in Latin. Being not ignorant of Greek, and finding nothing in the word eclogue, of rural meaning, he supposed it to be corrupted by the copiers, and, therefore, called his own productions æglogues, by which he meant to express the talk of goatherds, though it will mean only the talk of goats. This new name was adopted by subsequent writers, and, amongst others, by our Spenser.
More than a century afterwards, 1498, Mantuan published his Bucolicks with such success, that they were soon dignified by Badius with a comment, and, as Scaliger complained, received into schools, and taught as classical; his complaint was vain, and the practice, however injudicious, spread far, and continued long. Mantuan was read, at least in some of the inferiour schools of this kingdom, to the beginning of the present century. The speakers of Mantuan carried their disquisitions beyond the country, to censure the corruptions of the church; and from him Spenser learned to employ his swains on topicks of controversy.
The Italians soon transferred pastoral poetry into their own language: Sannazaro wrote Arcadia in prose and verse: Tasso and Guarini wrote Favole Boschareccie, or sylvan dramas; and all nations of Europe filled volumes with Thyrsis and Damon, and Thestylis and Phyllis.
Philips thinks it somewhat strange to conceive “how, in an age so addicted to the muses, pastoral poetry never comes to be so much as thought upon.” His wonder seems very unseasonable; there had never, from the time of Spenser, wanted writers to talk occasionally of Arcadia and Strephon; and half the book, in which he first tried his powers, consists of dialogues on queen Mary’s death, between Tityrus and Corydon, or Mopsus and Menalcas. A series or book of pastorals, however, I know not that any one had then lately published.
Not long afterwards, Pope made the first display of his powers in four pastorals, written in a very different form. Philips had taken Spenser, and Pope took Virgil for his pattern. Philips endeavoured to be natural, Pope laboured to be elegant.
Philips was now favoured by Addison, and by Addison’s companions, who were very willing to push him into reputation. The Guardian gave an account of pastoral, partly critical, and partly historical; in which, when the merit of the moderns is compared, Tasso and Guarini are censured for remote thoughts and unnatural refinements; and, upon the whole, the Italians and French are all excluded from rural poetry; and the pipe of the pastoral muse is transmitted, by lawful inheritance, from Theocritus to Virgil, from Virgil to Spenser, and from Spenser to Philips.
With this inauguration of Philips, his rival Pope was not much delighted; he, therefore, drew a comparison of Philips’s performance with his own, in which, with an unexampled and unequalled artifice of irony, though he has himself always the advantage, he gives the preference to Philips. The design of aggrandizing himself he disguised with such dexterity, that, though Addison discovered it, Steele was deceived, and was afraid of displeasing Pope by publishing his paper. Published, however, it was, (Guardian, 40,) and from that time Pope and Philips lived in a perpetual reciprocation of malevolence.