Notwithstanding all that has been written
about gentlemen peasants and shepherds, from
the time of Theocritus to Allan Ramsay, I do
most verily believe, that they have been, are,
and always will be, from the very nature of their
situation and employments, a set of indifferent
fellows, who are ignorant without being simple,
and whose ideas of love are limited pretty much
to the ordinary conceptions of their near neighbours,
the sheep and cattle. I can safely say, I
never saw one with a clean face, except at a
church or a review; and how a man without that
indispensable requisite, can be an object of affection
to any woman, except one who has a smutted
face herself, I can form no conception. Pastoral
poetry will probably never be very popular,
except among the class of people thus caricatured,
who of course, will be mightily tickled
with it, and strut about in their borrowed plumage,
like the daw in the peacock's feathers, or
more appropriately, the ass in the lion's skin. If
I were to look for homely honesty, or for sober
matter-of-fact virtues, among any class of people,
I would go to the labourers of the field, and the
tenders of sheep and cattle; but he who expects
to find among these classes the refinements of
sensibility, or the purity of love, may look for
soft hands and clean faces too.
Plato maintains that there were two Cupids,
one of whom was a god, and the other a dæmon;
by which he clearly meant to distinguish between
that polished and refined affection, which
is the boast of cultivated minds, and that animal
passion, which is, in general, the only bond of
union among the low, the ignorant, and the corrupted.
