Perhaps the best pastoral, ancient or modern, is the Gentle Shepherd of Allan Ramsay (q.v.), published in 1725. "It is." says Mr. Carruthers (Chambers's Quelopadia of Eng la& Literature, 601; p. 523 of 3d ed.), "a genuine picture of Scottish life, but of life passed in simple rural employments, apart from the guilt and fever of large towns, and reflecting only the pure and unsophisticated emotions of our nature. The affected sensibilities and feigned distresses of the Corydons and Delias find no place in Ramsay's clear and manly page. He drew his shepherds from the life, placed them in scenes which be actually saw, and made them speak the lauguage which he every day heard—the free idiomatic speech of his native vales." His English contemporaries, Pope, Ambrose Philips, Gay, and others, who form the "Augustan," or queen Anne school of poets, also addicted themselves to the composition of pastoral poetry; but though there is much fine description in the verses, they are, in general, purely conventional performances, in imitation of the classic poets, who, as we have said, did not themselves imitate nature.
From this censure, however, must be excepted the six pastorals Of Gay, entitled the Shepherd's Week, which are full of honest country humor, and contain charming pictures of English country life. Since the early part of the 18th' e., however, pastoral poetry, strictly so called, has ceased to be cultivated in England and almost everywhere else. In the pages of Wordsworth, who lived all his days among the Cumberland shepherds, we indeed find many exquisite glimpses of pastoral life, as it presented itself to the profound and tender imagination of that great poet of nature, but few direct delineations of pas toral manners. Germany imitated abundantly the French and Italian models during the greater part of the 18th century. The last and besteof the German series is the In and Elmira of Goethe's youth. The general impression appears to be that the age of pastoral poetry has passed away forever, and that Damon and Chloe will never reappear m verse.