Yet this hybrid creature is one of the
many zoological monsters to whom the Pastorals introduce us:
"I know thee. love! on foreign mountains born.
Wolves gave thee suck, and savage tigers fed.
Thou wert from Aetna's burning entrails torn.
Got by fierce whirlwinds, and in thunder born."
But the very names "Damon" and "Strephon," "Phillis" and "Delia,"
are rank with childishness. Arcadian life is, at the best, a
feeble conception, and rests upon the false principle of crowding
together all the luscious sweets of rural life, undignified by the
danger which attends pastoral life in our climate, and unrelieved
by shades, either moral or physical. And the Arcadia of Pope's age
was the spurious Arcadia of the opera theatre, and, what is worse,
of the French opera.
The hostilities which followed between these rival wooers of the
pastoral muse are well known. Pope, irritated at what he conceived
the partiality shown to Philips in the Guardian, pursued the review
ironically; and, whilst affecting to load his antagonist with
praises, draws into pointed relief some of his most flagrant
faults. The result, however, we cannot believe. That all the wits,
except Addison, were duped by the irony, is quite impossible. Could
any man of sense mistake for praise the remark, that Philips had
imitated "_every_ line of Strada; "that he had introduced
wolves into England, and proved himself the first of gardeners by
making his flowers "blow all in the same season.
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