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which is calculated to excite laughter by exh objects of folly and ridicule.

In a poem expressive of tender sentime seems necessary that the scene should be la distance from places of business and public and should be filled with a description of rural o and amusements. Shepherds, therefore, bein earliest inhabitants of the country, enjoying eas happiness, were naturally pitched upon as the persons who could, with probability, be repres in compositions of this nature. Hence it see have arisen, that the readers of such poems even critics, attending more to the sensible o that were exhibited, than to the end which the had in view, have considered that as primary was merely an accidental circumstance; and regarded the employment of tending flocks as tial in the persons represented. It is in conseq of this that the name of pastoral is now com appropriated to that sort of composition, whic been substituted in place of Eclogues, Idyllia, S and several others used by ancient authors. No son, however, occurs for adhering to those ideas in the present state of the world, wher situation of things is totally changed. Many p at present may, with probability, be supposed t in the country, whose situation in life has no co tion with that of shepherds, and yet whose ch ter is equally suitable to the sentiments which o to prevail in that species of writing.

It may even be doubted whether the repr tation of sentiments belonging to the real in tants of the country, who are strangers to a finement, or those entertained by a person o elegant and cultivated mind, who, from choice tires into the country, with a view of enjoying t pleasures which it affords, is calculated to produ

more interesting picture. If the former is recommended by its naïveté, and simplicity, it may be expected that the latter should have the preference in point of beauty and variety.

Two of the greatest poets of antiquity have described the pleasures of a country life in these two different aspects. The former view is exhibited, with great propriety and elegance, in one of the most beautiful poems

of Horace :

Quod si pudica mulier in partem juvans
Domum, atque dulces liberos;
(Sabina qualis, aut perusta solibus
Pernicis uxor Appuli)

Sacrum vetustis exstruat lignis focum
Lassi sub adventum viri:

Claudensque textis cratibus lætum pecus
Distenta siccet ubera;

Et borna dulci vina promens dolio
Dapes inemptas apparet.

But if a chaste and virtuous wife
Assist him in the tender care,

Epod. 2.

Of sun-burnt charms, but honest fame
(Such as the Sabine or Apulian dame);
Fatigued when homeward he returns,
The sacred fire with cheerful lustre burns;
Or if she milk her swelling kine,
Or in their folds his happy flock confine;
While unbought dainties crown the feast,
And luscious wines from this year's vintage prest.

FRANCIS,

The more elevated Virgil has given a picture of the latter kind no less delightful, in that passage at the end of the second book of the Georgics, be. ginning,

O fortunatos nimium sua si bona nôr int
Agricolas.

VOL. XXXVII.

E

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The enlargement of the field of pastoral po which is here suggested, would surely be of ad tage, considering how much the common topic that species of writing are already exhausted. are become weary of the ordinary sentiment shepherds, which have been so often repeated, which have usually nothing but the variety of pression to recommend them. The greater par the productions which have appeared under name of pastorals are, accordingly, so insipid, a have excited little attention, which is the more markable, because the subjects which they trea naturally interest the affections, and are ea painted in such delusive colours as tend to soo the imagination by romantic dreams of ha

Mr. de Fontenelle has attempted to write pastor upon the extensive plan above mentioned; b though this author writes with great elegance prose, his poetical talents seem rather below diocrity; so that it is not likely he will be garded, by succeeding poets, as a model for i tation.

31

N°80. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1780.

Ex fumo dare lucem

Cogitat ut speciosa dehinc miracula promat.

HOR.

AUTHORS have been divided into two classes, the instructive and the entertaining; to which has been added a third, who mix, according to Horace, the • utile dulci,' and are, in his opinion, entitled to the highest degree of applause.

Readers complain, that in none of these departments is there, in modern writing, much pretension to originality. In science, they say, so much has been already discovered, that all a modern writer has left, is, to explain and enforce the systems of our predecessors; and, in literature, our fathers have so exhausted the acuteness of reasoning, the flashes of wit, the luxuriance of description, and the invention of incident, that an author now-a-days can only give new form, not matter, to his argument; a new turn, not thought, to his epigram; new attitudes, not object, to his picture; new language, not situation, to his story.

However true this complaint may be in the main, there is one class of writers to whom the charge of triteness does, I apprehend, very little apply. They are generally of the first species mentioned above, who publish useful information to mankind; yet in the last quarter of the 18th century, their information is often as new as if they had written in the infancy of art and of science, when every field

was open to the researches of industry, and the invention of genius. The writers I allude to, are the authors of those little essays which appear in the learned world under the title of ADVERTISE

MENTS.

The necessary and ornamental arts of life are equally the objects of the class of authors whom I describe. In both, I will venture to assert, that the novelty of their productions is equal to their usefulness.

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It was formerly imagined, that disease was an evil which mankind had inherited as a punishment for the lapse of their progenitor. Milton has given, in his Paradise Lost, a catalogue of some of those tormenting maladies which were to be felt by the race of fallen Adam.- -So has Dr. Dominiceti in an advertisement, which is now lying before me; but, with the most extraordinary force of original discovery, has informed us, that, in his treatment of those disorders, there is no evil, no pain, but, on the contrary, much pleasure, and even luxury. . I en'gage,' says the Doctor, with pleasure and even luxury, to the patient, to increase or diminish the vital beat, and the circulatory, secretory, and excretory functions; to soften and relax the too hard and dry muscular and nervous fibres, and contracted ligaments; and to harden and make compact, and give the proper 'tone and elasticity to the too moist and flabby muscular and nervous fibres, and relaxed sinews, and provide and establish an equilibrium between the fluids and • vessels; to sweeten acrid, corrosive, and saline humours; and to cure the dropsy, asthma, consumptions, colic, gravel, rheumatism, palsy, pleurisy, and fevers, stone and gout, scurvy and leprosy; to mollify and destroy inveterate callosities, to deterge and cure obstinate ulcers, &c.

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