they had once hopes of starving me into measures, but finding me inflexible, the father complied with my proposal, and told me he liked me the more for being so good at a bargain. I was now married to Mitissa, and was to experience the happiness of a match made without passion..... Mitissa soon discovered that she was equally prudent with myself, and had taken a husband only to be at her own command, and to have a chariot at her own call. She brought with her an old maid recommended by her mother, who taught her all the arts of domestic management, and was on every occasion, her chief agent and directress. They soon invented one reason or other to quarrel with all my servants, and either prevailed on me to turn them away, or treated them so ill, that they left me of themselves, and always supplied their places with some brought from my wife's relations. Thus they established a family, over which I had no authority, and which was in a perpetual conspiracy against me; for Mitissa considered herself as having a separate interest, and thought nothing her own but what she laid up without my knowledge. For this reason she brought me false accounts of the expenses of the house, joined with my tenants in complaints of hard times, and, by means of a steward of her own, took rewards for soliciting abatements of the rent. Her great hope is to outlive me, that she may enjoy what she has thus accumulated, and therefore she is always contriving some improvements of her jointure-land; and once tried to procure an injunction to hinder me from selling timber upon it for repairs. Her father and mother assist her in her projects; and are frequently hinting that she is ill used, and reproaching me with the presents that other ladies receive from their husbands. Such, Sir, was my situation for seven years, till at last my patience was exhausted; and having one day invited her father to my house, I laid the state of my affairs before him, detected my wife in several of her frauds, turned out her steward, charged a constable with her maid, took my business into my own hands, reduced her to a settled allowance, and now write this account to warn others against marrying those whom they have no reason to esteem. I am, &c. No. XXXVI. SATURDAY, JULY 21, 1750. *Αμ' έπον ο νομίες Τερπόμενοι σύριγξι. δόλου δ' ότι προνόησαν. Piping on their reeds, the shepherds go; HOMER. POPE. THERE is scarcely any species of poetry that has allured more readers, or excited more writers, than the Pastoral. It is generally pleasing, because it entertains the mind with representations of scenes familiar to almost every imagination, and of which all can equally judge whether they are well described.... It exhibits a life to which we have been always accustomed to associate peace, and leisure, and innocence; and therefore we readily set open the heart for the admission of its images, which contribute to drive away cares and perturbations, and suffer ourselves without resistance to be transported to elysian regions, where we are to meet with nothing but joy, and plenty, and contentment; where every gale whispers pleasure, and every shade promises repose. It has been maintained by some, who love to talk of what they do not know, that pastoral is the most ancient poetry; and, indeed, since it is probable that poetry is nearly of the same antiquity with rational nature, and since the life of the first man was certainly rural, we may reasonably conjecture, that, as their ideas would necessarily be borrowed from those objects with which they were acquainted, their composures, being filled chiefly with such thoughts on the visible creation as must occur to the first observers, were pastoral hymns, like those which Milton introduces the original pair singing, in the day of innocence, to the praise of their Maker. For the same reason that pastoral poetry was the first employment of the human imagination, it is generally the first literary amusement of our minds. We have seen fields, and meadows, and groves, from the time that our eyes opened upon life; and are pleased with-birds, and brooks, and breezes, much earlier than we engage among the actions and passions of mankind. We are, therefore, delighted with rural pictures, because we know the original at an age when our curiosity can be very little awakened by descriptions of courts, which we never beheld, or representations of passion which we never felt. The satisfaction received from this kind of writing not only begins early, but lasts long; we do not, as we advance into the intellectual world, throw it away among other childish amusements and pastimes, but willingly return to it in any hour of indolence and relaxation. The images of true pastoral have always the power of exciting delight, because the works of nature, from which they are drawn, have always the same order and beauty, and continue to force them selves upon our thoughts, being at once obvious to the most careless regard, and more than adequate to the strongest reason and severest contemplation. Our inclination to stillness and tranquillity is seldom much Jessened by long knowledge of the busy and tumultuary part of the world. In childhood we turn our thoughts to the country, as to the region of pleasure; we recur to it in old age as a port of rest, and perhaps with that secondary and adventitious gladness which every man feels on reviewing those places, or recollecting those occurrences, that contributed to his youthful enjoyments, and bring him back to the prime of life, when the world was gay with the bloom of novelty, when mirth wantoned at his side, and hope sparkled before him. The sense of this universal pleasure, has invited numbers without number, to try their skill in pastoral performances, in which they have generally succeeded, after the manner of other imitators, transmitting the same images in the same combination from one to another, till he that reads the title of a poem, may guess at the whole series of the composition; nor will a man, after the perusal of thousands of these performances, find his knowledge enlarged with a single view of nature not produced before, or his ima gination amused with any new application of those views to moral. purposes. The range of pastoral is indeed narrow; for though nature itself, philosophically considered, be inexhaustible, yet its general effects on the eye and on the ear are uniform, and incapable of much variety of description. Poetry cannot dwell upon the minuter distinctions, by which one species differs from another, without departing from that simplicity and grandeur which fills the imagination, nor dissect the latent qualities of things, without losing its general power of gratifying every mind by recalling its conceptions. However, as each age makes some discoveries, and as those discoveries are by degrees generally known, as new plants, or modes of culture, are in-troduced, and by little and little become common, pastoral might receive, from time to time, small augmentations, and exhibit, once in a century, a scene somewhat varied. But pastoral subjects have been often, like others, taken into the hands of those that were not qualified to adorn them; men to whom the face of nature was so little known, that they have drawn it only after their own imagination, and changed or distorted her features, that their portraits might appear something more than servile copies from their predecessors. Not only the images of rural life, but the occasions on which they can be properly produced, are few and general. The state of man confined to the employments and pleasures of the country, is so little diversified, and exposed to so few of those accidents which produce perplexities, terrors, and surprises in more complicated transactions, that he can be shown but seldom in such circumstances as attract curiosity. His ambition is without policy, and his love without intrigue. He has no complaints to make of his rival, but that he is richer than himself; nor any disasters to lament, but a cruel mistress, or a bad harvest. The conviction of the necessity of some new source of pleasure induced Sannazarius to remove the scene from the fields to the sea, to substitute fishermen for shepherds, and derive his sentiments from the piscatory life; for which he has been censured by succeeding critics, because the sea is an object of terror, and by no means proper to amuse the mind and lay the passions to sleep. Against this objection he might be defended by the established maxim, that the poet has a right to select his images, and is no more obliged to show the sea in a storm, than the land under an inundation; but may display all the pleasures, and conceal the dangers of the water, as he may lay his shepherd under a shady beech, without giving him an ague, or letting a wild beast loose upon him. There are, however, two defects in the piscatory eclogue, which perhaps cannot be supplied. The |