The Shepherd's Week contains elements which would justify its place not only in this volume. But as its quality of a political Gelegenheitsgedicht has hitherto been overlooked by critics, the poem will be treated of in this context.

Gay's Eclogues pay homage to the period of peace after Utrecht and to those who were responsible for it, by picturing Queen Anne's Tory millennium. The poet thereby facetiously made use of the expression Golden Age both as a term of criticism of pastoral poetry and as a notion which in its conventional sense was alien to "modern" doctrines of progress and cyclic changes, in particular adhered to by Whig Augustans.

The famous Guardian rules for serious English pastoral poetry are of about the same importance for The Shepherd's Week, as Addison's precepts concerning Georgics for Wine, to some extent for Rural Sports and for others of Gay's poems which will be treated of later on. No more than Swift in The City Morning did Gay form "fields, or nymphs, or groves where they [were] not"¹, although the contrast was not driven as far as in Wine, for instance. The rural scene was here preserved as a prerequisite for pastoral poetry. As so often, Gay imitated the genre in the comic mode, picturing the "image of the times" in all its aspects, in this poem in combination with idealized pastoral characters. In the case of pastoral poetry, the "image of the times", English "modern" Eclogues about the busy period of peace after Utrecht, was an anomaly, whether in the light of the "neoclassic" school of pastoral criticism with its imitation of the Golden Age, or the "rationalistic" school with its generalized representation of the ease and tranquillity of a shepherd's life.

Gay killed at least two birds with one stone and indulged in laughter both at solemnity in criticism and at Augustan "high seriousness" and ambitious "modern" aspirations. In the field of pastoral poetry, the aspirations found an outlet in the amount of praise bestowed on Philips's Pastorals, which by implication purported to be and were interpreted by admirers as innovations. They supposedly played the same pioneering part as Theocritus' Idylls for the whole Kind and as The Shepherd's Calendar for Spenser and his epic poem, English poetry not far removed from its "infant state". Gay's Eclogues, on the other hand, are demonstratively and conspicuously imitative with echoes and borrowings from classical models. They are also related to low verse, yet no "country-scraper['s]" songs, but the most complicated products of "Art". This double nature of the poems is indicated in the Proeme, where Gay introduces himself as a simple rustic bard, but also reveals himself as a connoisseur of both criticism and the new philosophy. At the same time, more subtly than Philips's, the poems call to mind Elizabethan pastoral poetry.

Previous Criticism

Before entering on a detailed analysis of the poems to prove the above argument, it will be useful to make a survey of the abundant criticism that has hitherto been devoted to The Shepherd's Week.

Gay's purpose in writing his Eclogues has been discussed by a number of critics. Some, like Goldsmith,² Dr. Johnson,³ Southey,⁴ Aikin,⁵ and later on Austin Dobson,⁶ Kerlin,⁷ Homer Smith,⁸ find that Gay went beyond his original intention of burlesque or parody of some sort of pastoral poetry. Goldsmith concluded that "Gay has hit the true spirit of pastoral poetry". Dr. Johnson praised the reality and truth to nature. Aikin could not decide whether The Shepherd's Week was "jest or earnest". The discussion long turned upon the question whether Gay ridiculed the conventional, "refined" form of the genre or the anglicized type, as it was represented in the period by Ambrose Philips's Pastorals. Pope was originally responsible for the view that his own quarrel with Philips, which originated in the exaggerated praise of his rival's poems by the Whig poets, was what induced Gay to write The Shepherd's Week.⁹ Pope's editor Warburton passed it on as correct, adding that

the object of [the ridicule] was ill understood by those who were strangers to the quarrel. These mistook the Shepherd's Week for a burlesque of Virgil's Pastorals.¹⁰

In our own times, Professor Sherburn's investigation of Pope's early literary activities has given new support to the poet's interpretation of the aim and purpose of The Shepherd's Week, and a number of critics have adopted this view.¹¹

However, the "strangers to the quarrel" have also had their followers. One of them was Edmund Gosse, who found that for

the first time since the reign of Elizabeth, a serious attempt was made to throw to the winds the ridiculous Arcadian tradition of nymphs and swains, and to copy Theocritus in his simplicity.¹²

Gay has also in recent times been thought to parody Virgil, "for his burlesques are nearer to the Latin than many of the serious imitations".¹³ Although acknowledging the difficulty of ascertaining the object of ridicule, Professor Foster Jones found that the

strictness with which the poems adhere to the Virgilian type without any apparent artificiality makes them one of the most successful attempts at putting new wine into old bottles offered by the eighteenth century.¹⁴

According to Professor Bond, Gay burlesqued "the eclogue mould", but "did not imitate Philips' eclogues closely enough for parody."¹⁵ Two later writers on pastoral poetry also follow this line. Gay has been compared with Diaper in Nereides as an innovator of the genre,¹⁶ and The Shepherd's Week looked upon as a variation of the conventional pastoral poem.¹⁷

In the opinions of those who have investigated Gay's life and works, both views are reflected. Professor Irving inclines towards the latter theory and believes that "Gay may have encouraged Pope to think" that he ridiculed Philips, but that the fundamental idea for the poems may have been suggested by the Guardian papers on pastoral poetry, and that the poet also had burlesque of The Bucolics in mind.¹⁸ The most recent critic of Gay's poetry is of the opinion that The Shepherd's Week was

meant to … point up the incompatibility of describing British rural matter (actual country scenes and life) in the strict form of the Vergilian eclogue.¹⁹

The main support for this statement is the discussion in an article by Dr. Trowbridge, who by means of biographical and internal evidence, the latter obviously directed against Professor Bond's view, arrives at the conclusion that

in parallel echoes, Gay's poems follow up Pope's ironical criticism of Philips's in No. 40 of The Guardian and that therefore The Shepherd's Week was designed as a burlesque of Philips's Pastorals.

Any other hypothesis, "a realistic picture of country life", "a burlesque of pastoral poetry in general" or "a Virgilian parody", is said to provide insufficient explanation. The poem can be understood and enjoyed "only against the background of controversy in which it originated".²⁰ One or two things may, however, be observed concerning the arguments for Gay's indiscriminate aversion to the poets at Button's coffee-house. In the light of more recent research, it is obvious that at the time Gay must have been on friendly terms with Steele.²¹ After the main event of the following year, the performance and the publication of The What D 'Ye Call It (1715), he was still patronized by Addison, who subscribed generously to Trivia and received the poet's particular thanks.²² Besides, part of what has been adduced as biographical evidence rather illustrates more general tendencies in Gay's production.²³ Some of the internal evidence is perhaps also a little doubtful.²⁴

The variation of opinions among critics about Gay's purpose in writing his Eclogues seems partly to have been caused by some uncertainty as to the real character of Ambrose Philips's Pastorals.²⁵ This problem has been disentangled by Professor Congleton, who has drawn the line between the "neoclassic" and the "rationalistic"-empirical schools of pastoral criticism, which were prevalent in late 17th and early 18th century England.²⁶ The former school, after Rapin²⁷ and with Chetwood as its first English representative, based its principles on ancient authoritative precedence in criticism and poetical practice. Pastoral poetry should convey an image of shepherds living in the Golden Age, reflect the affluence, contentment, and innocence of that age in a simple though not rustic language, in the manner of Virgil rather than of Theocritus. The more "modern" school; after Fontenelle, discarded ancient authority and applied a psychological method, took the demands of the poet's audience into account, so to speak. It was the "Native Laziness" in the reader and his love of "some motion" that made the poet succeed with idealized pastoral poetry, "a kind of half Truth", about the tranquillity and ease of a shepherd's life seasoned with the "Passion[s]" of love. Theocritean "Country Matters" were condemned.²⁸ Yet an actual poem written according to the "modern" notions might not be very different from the Golden Age images that the "neoclassic" critics recommended,²⁹ just as, for a comparison, the Sublime was very much the same, whether according to Longinus or to Dennis. It was the methods of attaining to the critical principles that differed. In the case of pastoral poetry, Aristotelian poetics was obviously at the fountain head of both schools.³⁰

The famous Guardian essays on pastoral poetry³¹ belong to the "rationalistic" school, although there is in fact also a sprinkling of "neoclassic" notions.³² To Fontenelle's reason why pastoral poetry pleased, the author of the paper No. 22 also added two others, more typically English perhaps, namely the reader's love of the countryside and his "secret approbation" of natural goodness.³³ In contrast to both French critics, No. 28 gave the palm to Theocritus in preference to Virgil. But for the specific usage of English pastoralists, the fourth paper, No. 30, departed from foreign theories and, in the spirit of Addison about the "clime" in a Georgic,³⁴ advised poets how they could "lawfully deviate from the ancients." "The difference of the climate" had to be considered, and also such things "of a changeable kind" as the customs, "theology",³⁵ dress, and sports of the characters, whom the essayist persistently calls shepherds. The pastoral poems on which he based his precepts and to which he resorted for examples, were those by Spenser and Ambrose Philips. In The Guardian, No. 40, however, Pope ironically compared Philips's Pastorals with his own, thereby seemingly adopting the views of the preceding Guardian papers, but in reality defending his own "neoclassic" principles. Finally, Gay's views of this problem are deduced by Professor Congleton from the Proeme to The Shepherd's Week, which is read as consistently ironic in the manner of Pope's essay. Gay is said to have pronounced himself in favour not only of a simple though not rustic diction and conventional pastoral names, but also of "Golden Age shepherds", such as those used by Pope, and of descriptions of "such decorous prospects as are to be found in the classical idyls and eclogues".³⁶

The most recent contributor to the discussion about the aim of The Shepherd's Week has approached the problem from a new angle. Dr. Ellis has demonstrated some similarities with and borrowings from the Wit and Mirth volumes which can be detected in Gay's Eclogues, and also pointed to some passages in the poetry of the period where the names of Ambrose Philips and D'Urfey are linked together as of equal rank.³⁷—D'Urfey was the principal poet represented in Playford's song-books and had the reputation of being an unlearned and popular writer, a gay and harmless songster.³⁸—Dr. Ellis concludes that Gay intended to insult Philips by ostensibly making D'Urfey the object of his parody, a "trick for escaping the responsibility of ridiculing Philips", and that he "did not intend to encourage, but rather to hinder, the growth of a native poetry about the peasant".³⁹

Finally, Professor Dobree has emphasized the genuine pastoral spirit, the "humour and lightheartedness which carries back" to Elizabethan poetry.⁴⁰

The Shepherd's Week in the Light of Gay's Earlier Productions and of Contemporary Pastoral Poetry

Can the result of the investigations referred to above—Gay's parody of Virgil, his ridicule of Philips directly or by way of D'Urfey, his support of conventional pastoral poetry with its "decorous prospects" against "the growth of a native poetry about the peasant"—be reconciled with the tendencies that can be distinguished in the poet's early productions? Before writing his Eclogues, Gay had already ridiculed solemnity in criticism and high-flown pretensions at genius and inspiration. Against high Kinds, heroic loftiness, and Augustan "high seriousness", he had set his own low Kinds and low subject matter. By way of close imitation, he had adapted classical poems and themes to his own time, produced the "image of the times". He had echoed and followed the mode of older English poetry, and The Shepherd's Week was not the first poem where he echoed, borrowed from, or at least indirectly availed himself of the realism of low poetry or even prose. Wine, The Mohocks, Araminta, even Rural Sports and The Fan are evidence of this. Gay's view of pastoral poetry may have been the conventional. The genre was what it was even to him. But the fact remains that he never wrote conventional pastoral poems like Walsh's or Pope's. Even in his pastoral songs, the few "shades" and "streams" which occur, are mixed with realistic details.⁴¹ The plays which contain pastoral elements, The What D'Ye Call It and Dione, are in varying ways non-conventional. Besides, Gay had already displayed a taste for experiments and new schemes, not only in Wine and Rural Sports, but also in Panthea, a fashionable lady's rural Elegy,⁴² in Araminta, an urbanized version of a classical Elegy, and in A Contemplation on Night, a "modern" version of the conventional descriptions of night. The two latter poems are particularly relevant examples of how Gay, probably in 1712 and 1713 respectively, varied conventional forms, raised traditionally low characters or brought old themes up to date, so to speak. In the two Elegies, in particular, Gay heeded Prior's admonition to the "Translators" in his own "artful" manner and without resorting to the freedom of a D'Urfey, whose originality Prior seemed to prefer.⁴³ If Gay had expressed his reaction against yet another edition of Ovid's Epistles, he might be expected to respond in a similar way to outworn forms of pastoral poetry. There was indeed a need for rejuvenating the pastoral genre.

Among the most common types of the Kind, were the translations and imitations of "the Greeks and Romans", the apparent immediate occasion of The Guardian, No. 30. The Miscellany Poems, I and II (1702), contain versions of Idylls by Dryden, Duke and Bowles, and translations of Virgil's Eclogues by Caryll, Tate, Creech, Dryden, Duke, Chetwood, and three or four others. Although the 1716 edition changed in the direction of a more popular taste, it still reprinted most of the translations. An expert in the Virgilian elegiac Kind, though not always close to the pattern, was Robert Gould. His Works might alone have been sufficient to provide a Tickell and a Trapp with the material for their "perusals" of pastoral poems with "fifty lean flocks, … an hundred left-handed ravens, besides blasted oaks", and "withering meadows". Although Gould professed his disbelief in the "Tales" of the Ancients and "an Age of Gold", in "Flow'ry Shades" and "faithful Swains",⁴⁴ and although he consistently eschewed the conventional apotheosis, he filled one hundred and twelve octavo pages with Funeral Elegies and seventy pages with Funeral Eclogues, the latter, dialogues between Damon and Alexis, Menalcas and Strephon, Amyntor and Doran, etc. There was indeed reason for Trapp's exclamation, "Who can bear those Crowds of Pastorals, … daily publish'd in Latin and English, upon the Death of Princes, or Friends?"⁴⁵ Undergraduates also seem to have written Eclogues, perhaps with a secret hope of future glory.⁴⁶

Less learned frenchified beaux, however, practised the pastoral song,⁴⁷ which was so common that Ned Ward ironically called it "the inimittable Song of O Happy Groves",⁴⁸ not imitations of Virgil or Theocritus, but pastoral poems in the French manner which were condemned in The Guardian, No. 28, as "a run of numbers, commonplace descriptions of woods, floods, groves, loves, &c." Their extreme popularity appears from No. 1 of the Delights for the Ingenious, for instance, where the editor⁴⁹ encourages his readers to collaboration and tries to smoothe their way by printing poems "designed as a Pattern chiefly, of the Kinds of Verse, and of such Subjects that generally please the most sort of Readers". The "pattern" for pastoral poetry is The Parting, of which I quote the first stanza.

 CHLOE once in Face and Mind,
The best and brightest of her Kind,
In Rural Gardens, Groves and Glades,
Flow'ry Fields and verdant Shades,
Did all her softer Hours improve With Wit,
and Innocence, and Love;
Then, Thyrsis wrapt in Joys Divine,
Was ever Passion bless'd like Thine!

The subsequent contributions are all dialogues—the pastoral Kind had been defined as a sub-species of the "Dramatick"—and all the "actors" are Strephons and Celias, Damons and Dorindas, Daphnes and Sylvias or similar characters. Gould's volumes contain thirty-one pastoral songs with Celias, Myrtillos and their usual companions. The genre was common in the Wit and Mirth volumes and other Playford music-books, in publications like The Diverting Post (1704-06) and on the broadsheets. In the ballad collections, the foreign shepherds recur with such persistency that J. W. Ebsworth, editor and co-editor, respectively, of The Bagford Ballads and The Roxburghe Ballads, could even maintain that the Strephons were more frequent than the Damons and the Coridons, none of them individualized, even by Dryden.⁵⁰ The "inimittable Song" indeed grew so threadbare that the "purling stream" and the "shady grove" became catch-words for country-scenery even in prose,⁵¹ just as meaningless as the "lean flocks" and the "track of light in the skies" of the funeral Elegy.

"Neoclassic" Pastoralists, "Country-Scraper[s]" and Their "Prelude[s]"

If we call to mind Gay's early practice, it is really not possible to assume that, even without the challenge of the Pope-Philips controversy, the poet should have chosen to write pastoral poetry in concession to conventions as outworn as has been sketched above. It was in his view of the problem of imitation versus "original composition" that Gay was "neoclassic". To him the difference was between learned pastoral poems and those of the "country-scraper". Pope and himself represented the former school, whereas Philips and D'Urfey provided examples of the latter. In both categories of pastoral poetry, names, scenery, etc. could either be conventional or English, as in fact they were.—D'Urfey at least edited a number of conventional pastoral lyrics.—On the other hand, even Pope half-heartedly had his eye on Northern plains and groves and introduced some English names of "shades" and "streams" in the manner of the translators of L 'Art poetique and Le Lutrin.⁵²

As Dr. Ellis has shown, D'Urfey and Philips were regarded by the Scriblerians as "two of a kind",⁵³ but not, it must be emphasized, just because both wrote indigenous pastoral poetry. D'Urfey was more or less condescendingly represented as an original lyric poet, by Prior, for instance, and by Steele in The Tatler, No. 1, where his style and manner are said to be "wholly new and unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans".⁵⁴ He was indeed the unlearned "sonneteer" par excellence— at the same time, it should be noticed, an expert angler—tolerated, sometimes even liked by learned poets, as long as he stuck to his catches and ditties, his "Fish-hooks, Baits, and artificial Flies".⁵⁵ No wonder that he was patronized by Steele, who had a taste for things non-heroic. In his Pastorals, Philips rather cautiously set out to continue the part of "country-scraper" that he had played earlier,⁵⁶ like the "sonneteer", contemptible to strict neo-classicists of the school of Rapin, because relying on genius or "Wit" and "a lucky hit" more than on learning. Philips's way of mentioning Theocritus, Virgil and Spenser in his Preface and his declaration by way of implication that he intended to imitate country scenery,⁵⁷ Nature, rather than other poets' "groves" and "streams", indicate that he regarded himself as an innovator within the Kind. His style was also simple, and he actually invited comparison with D'Urfey when he called his poems "ditties".⁵⁸ Partly, however, against his role of originator, Philips fell into the usual rut of servile imitation. That is why Pope's ridicule in The Guardian, No. 40, of The Third Pastoral after Virgil's Eclogue Vand of The Fifth after Strada was particularly apt.⁵⁹ Pope himself, though not professedly an "original composer", was shortly to be rebuked for his "Imitations" by another member of the other school.⁶⁰

The persistent eulogies of Philips's Pastorals from the quarters of Whig poets⁶¹ to the exclusion of Pope's did, however, not just imply praise or inattention, respectively, of isolated productions. What gave an added point to this taking of sides was the fact that the pastoral genre was considered to be the "prelude to Epic", a notion of which Philips had reminded his readers in the Preface to his Pastorals. In praising their friend then, the Whig poets at Button's made clear that they expected him to fulfil a promise of "something greater", as Addison expressed it. Gay, it will be remembered, had early hailed Pope as a pastoral poet with the same prospects of a greater future that could now be read between the lines of the encomiums of Philips.⁶²

It was about this time, in particular, that Horace's advice to poets to choose subjects "equal to [their] strength"⁶³ seems to have been adopted as the leading principle of Scriblerian friends in contrast to the aspirations of their antagonists towards Aristotelian high Kinds. This is obvious not only from Gay's productions, indirectly from Wine and Rural Sports and directly from the Guardian essay on dress (1713) and the later Epistle to Burlington (1715), but also from Swift's First Ode of the Second Book of Horace Paraphras 'd (1714) and Parnell's Bookworm (1714).⁶⁴

So that although ridicule of Philips was part of Gay's game in The Shepherd's Week, the point was not only directed against the Whig poet's Pastorals, but also and mainly against the patriotic pretentiousness of the whole party supporting them, and that was Gay's game more than Pope's at this time. Like the essays on genius by the two friends,⁶⁵The Shepherd's Week and The Guardian, No. 40, have a similar aim, namely to argue against pretentious "scribbler[s]" and "country-scraper[s]" and for learned, "artful" poetry. But in both cases, Gay is not only the more cheerful critic. In contrast to Pope's, his ridicule is also more positive and in itself a defence for the modest "little Taste", in this poem, low pastoral characters and rural matter, a close observation of details and a cheerful mood as opposed to solemnity in criticism, conventions, and sentimental features in pastoral poetry. Pope had discreetly pointed to Virgil as his model and written "downright poetry". Philips had compared himself to the great pastoralists and produced insipid poems and slavish imitation. Gay, however, frankly introduced himself as a rustic bard, an 18th century Autolicus, a Bowzybeus,⁶⁶ and thus disclaimed any promise for the future, although in fact he really brought his poetical career to a climax.

Cheerful Bowzybeus and His Criticism

In interpreting the prefatory pieces to The Shepherd's Week, the tone of the whole poem with its lightness and gaiety must be taken into consideration. Gay was still a hopeful young man, who had yet to meet the really serious disappointment in his poetical and diplomatic career. Both the Proeme and the Prologue reveal such a boyish cheerfulness and such a delight at playing the game of disguise, the part of the simple bard, that it is difficult to believe that our "Loving Countryman" could have kept up an attitude of cool irony behind the mask of the rustic swain. Moreover, this was not the only occasion on which Gay played the part of a fancy character. He seems to have been so thoroughly familiar with some ballad figures that they took on general characteristics, which could be applied to himself and his friends. In the Suffolk collection of manuscripts, for instance, there is an unpublished letter from Gay to somebody he calls "your Grace",⁶⁷ possibly the Duke of Queensberry, or perhaps "Duke" Disney. He addresses his friend "Most Honour'd Roger", and calls himself "a Timothy Tim". Lady Jekyll is "a Tim", and "the Duchess of Queensberry is so too", although sometimes she has her "Ralph Days".⁶⁸ Gay also talks of some common friends, the "Rigadoon[s]" and of a certain "Society of Tips". The dancing-masters he obviously knew through some Italian woman.⁶⁹ Gay looks upon his addressee as an "ignorant Caxton just come out of the Country" and promises to tell him the names of his "Friends & Relations" when they meet again. The whole spirit of the letter is that of the Proeme to The Shepherd's Week, and one is sometimes more true to one's character in disguise than in one's own clothes.

Although the main tone of Gay's naive Preface is raillery, it is possible to read it in a straightforward way, if one remembers the double nature of the author. Our "Loving Countryman" is actually half learned and half of the mould of the writers employed by Thomas Cross and the Playfords, and the Proeme partly profound and partly naive. Like other pastoral poets—Guarini, Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Spenser—Gay defended his innovation. One of his models was naturally the Dedicatory Epistle and the Argument prefixed to The Shepherd's Calendar,⁷⁰ the only English pastoral poems of importance in the general discussion on the genre from Dryden onwards. There are even in Gay's Preface verbal echoes like "travail", "gallimawfry", "more rumbling than rural". But the language is not just a "richly flavored Elizabethan diction".⁷¹ It is also appropriately the circumstantial language used, for instance, in contemporary vulgar advertisements about "excellent Pills" for the "Green-sickness" or about fortune-telling according to the "most Noble Art of Christian Astrology",⁷² the sort of language, realistic details not abstractions, which for its comic effects was sometimes resorted to in mock-Prefaces.⁷³ That Gay paid attention to advertisements is obvious from a letter to Parnell, March 26 [?], 1716, where he mentions The Bookworm and says that at Button's, "Gentlemen have been made to void Worms for advertisements by Mr John Moore's worm powder". Then follows a long poem dedicated to Mr. John Moore "of the celebrated Worm Powder".⁷⁴

In defending his Eclogues, Gay first of all makes fun of solemn quarrels between critics of pastoral poetry. In his "preface meet", Gay, or Bowzybeus, as he calls himself in the Prologue,⁷⁵ describes the reactions of imaginary critics, just as he was to do in the Preface to The What D'Ye Call It.

GREAT marvell hath it been (and that not unworthily) to diverse worthy wits, that in this our Island of Britain, in all rare sciences so greatly abounding, more especially in all kinds of Poesie highly flourishing, no Poet (though otherways of notable cunning in roundelays) hath hit on the right simple Eclogue after the true ancient guise of Theocritus, before this mine attempt.

The opinion is noted with some surprise by the poet Bowzybeus, and rightly, for his swains and maidens had appeared on many of the broadsheets that were peddled along country lanes or brought home to cottages from nearby fairs. Yet, like any other writer of "A New Ballad", he knows no rival "travailing in this plain high-way of Pastoral". But John Gay remembers Fontenelle's aversion to Theocritus well enough to quote the passage from Idyll I that the French critic found particularly "gross".⁷⁶ He is sufficiently learned to quote from the Greek, but his prose version shows that he also knows Creech's translation.⁷⁷ The incorrect number of the Idyll is perhaps a gleeful dig at Philips's unsuccessful Third Pastoral.⁷⁸ To the simple taste of Bowzybeus, it is not only the recent "rout" about the Golden Age that seems "idle" and futile. He has also discovered that poems written according to the principles of the "neoclassic" school are not very different from those supposedly written after the theories of the "rationalistic" critics. What The Guardian has allowed as lawful deviations, Gay, the rustic bard, considers to be a loose garment thrown over the same sort of character, which is not to his taste, whether in "Gothic" disguise or not.⁷⁹

Verily, as little pleasance receiveth a true homebred tast, from all the fine finical new-fangled fooleries of this gay Gothic garniture, wherewith they so nicely bedeck their court clowns, or clown courtiers, (for, which to call them rightly, I wot not) as would a prudent citizen journeying to his country farms, should he find them occupied by people of this motley make, instead of plain downright hearty cleanly folk, such as be now tenants to the Burgesses of this realme.

In order to underline the fact that he has seen through the cheat, Gay makes the last few lines of this passage echo "neoclassic" Dryden's description of Virgil, as he appears to him in the Pollio and the Silenus.⁸⁰

Gay or Bowzybeus goes on to convey his own idea of Eclogues—and here the double-natured poet certainly expresses his own conviction.—They must be such, "as nature in the country affordeth". As regards the characters or "the manners ", they must also be "meetly copied from the rustical folk" in the poet's beloved "native country Britain". Where the scenery is concerned, the "gentle reader" can expect "a picture, or rather lively landschape of [his] own country". For an illustration, Gay quotes the simile in which Milton expresses the sudden delight of the Serpent at seeing Eve in the Garden of Eden.

As one who long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air
Forth issuing on a summer's mom to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoin'd, from each thing met conceives delight;
The smell of grain or tedded grass or kine
Or dairie, each rural sight, each rural sound.⁸¹

I do not think this is plain irony.⁸² But it is significant that the poet borrowed one of Milton's pictorial similes, as he did on other occasions. Perhaps, for a contrast with Pope and Philips, this was Gay's way of humbly confessing that he made no promise for the future, and that his Muse was not fit for the high Kinds, but rather for descriptions.—Like the other English critics of pastoral poetry, Gay or Bowzybeus has his opinion of Spenser, whom he also loves as "a bard of sweetest memorial". He is familiar with Dryden's and Pope's⁸³ disapproval of Spenser's verse and of the allegory a la Mantuan in pastoral poetry, as well as with the discussion about Spenserian names, the observation or neglect of decorum,⁸⁴ and the use of dialect.⁸⁵ To Bowzybeus, of course, Spenser's names are what "liketh [him] best". Unlike Philips, however, the rustic bard did not add French-sounding names in his poems, but names from more congenial sources. Furthermore, the problem of the existence of the pastoral wolf was so famous in the period that it had even been referred to by La Fontaine.⁸⁶ Pope, who ironically praised Philips's unrealistic allusion to a wolf, could support himself on July and November,⁸⁷ but our "Loving Countryman" gleefully quotes from September.

Well is known that since the Saxon King
Never was wolf seen, many or some
Nor in all Kent nor in christendom.

Bowzybeus, related as he almost is to Hogarth's signpainter and with no notion of the Idea, has, and should have, an exaggerated respect for decorum, as is shown by his opinion about the wolf, Sunday sports, rustic names, the English landscape "at the proper season ".

Queen Anne's and Bowzybeus's "Modern" Golden Age

It is in the passage on the language used by Bowzybeus's "ploughmen" and damsels that Gay displays his Scriblerian spirit and reveals the true character of his poems. In a naively and comically detailed style, he paraphrases Ben Jonson's succinct description of Spenser's pastoral diction, "no language".⁸⁸ Then he swerves round from the reference to this diction as such to the importance that was attached to it by the Renaissance poet.⁸⁹ Like E.K., Gay has provided "glosses and explanations of uncouth pastoral terms". But these are widely different from the "glosses" in The Shepherd's Calendar. They are realistic, concrete words, which indicate the character of Gay's Eclogues as "modern" poems.⁹⁰ This passage links up with another in the Proeme, which is equally significant and important. To Bowzybeus, the "gallimawfry" about an Arcadian Golden Age is nothing but "idle trumpery (only fit for schools and schoolboys)",⁹¹ the same sort of "trumpery" in fact as the ancient deities that Addison had relegated to schoolboy learning.⁹² After Bowzybeus has rejected the idealized pastoral poem, whether picturing the Golden Age state of things before the "decay" that the Ancients presupposed or the more "modern" half-truth of rural ease, he emits his unreserved opinion of the former conceit, which now suddenly takes on a different connotation and of which, he says,

I avow, I account nothing at all, knowing no age so justly to be instiled Golden, as this of our Sovereign Lady Queen ANNE.

Nobody really believed in either Arcadia or a Golden Age in the sense of the age of Saturn any longer.—Gay made common cause with Addison⁹³ and Philips⁹⁴ in this respect, as appears, for instance, in Damon and Cupid or in the Prologues to The Wife of Bath and Dione.⁹⁵—On the contrary, the idea of progress was common among "modern" Augustans. Shaftesbury's whole philosophy of optimism counteracted the old notion of decay,⁹⁶ and so did the activities of "modern" experimental philosophers and antiquarians.⁹⁷ Poets sang of the golden future, as for instance Dennis in A Poem upon the Death of Queen Anne (1714), which contains the most undisguised homage to the notion of a future British Golden Age. Even the last passage of Windsor-Forest prophesies Albion's future "golden days". The same notion in literary criticism had recently been expressed by Oldmixon in The Muses Mercury,⁹⁸ and Shaftesbury looked forward to the glory of the British Muses, who only wanted "repose of arms" to arrive at perfection.⁹⁹ The concept also affected pastoral poetry, although the author of The Guardian, who accepted the conventional idealization and even resorted to Arcadia for illustration, obviously assumed that the lawful deviations were timeless.¹⁰⁰ Hobbinol in Philips's Sixth Pastoral lays "Albion's Golden Days" in the days of Elizabeth, but he is corrected by Lanquet, who is appropriately progressive. Shepherds are happier now because Anna regins.

              O ever may she reign!
And bring on earth the golden age again.¹⁰¹

The Shepherd's Week provided the triumphant answer to similar desires, as far as the English ploughman was concerned. The Golden Age is now on earth, now that the "repose of arms" is a fact, unfortunately for the Whigs under Tory supremacy. Like Virgil, the shepherd poet leaves his pipe and his flocks for the Court, rid of his particular fears.

Of soldier's drum withouten dreed;
For Peace allays the shepherd's fear
Of wearing cap of Grenadier.¹⁰²
(II. 46-48)

The whole Prologue is Bowzybeus's own panegyric to the Queen and her ministers in gratitude for peace, Queen Anne's Golden Age, the poet's own time and not only his "clime". As in most of the peace poems, Oxford gets his share of praise,

Oxford, who a wand doth bear,¹⁰³
Like Moses, in our Bibles fair.

It befits the ballad poet to fetch his comparison from the Bible. It is, however, Bolingbroke who receives the main part of the peace poem eulogy. He is praised for his steadfastness to Tory principles, incarnated in the combination of "Church and Queen", a little surprising perhaps in the case of St. John, the deist, but natural to the simple poet as the two foremost objects of his veneration.—Learned poets referred to the Queen's interest in religion by describing the lofty spires of the City churches that she ordered to be built.—The usual description of the progress of trade follows. But the whole of this panegyric passage is more charming, more genuinely affectionate, though at the same time respectful, than any other addressed to St. John.

 Lo here, thou hast mine Eclogues fair,
But let not these detain thine ear.
Let not affairs of States and Kings
Wait, while our Bowzybeus sings.
Rather than verse of simple swain
Should stay the trade of France or Spain,
Or for the plaint of Parson's maid,
Yon' Emp'ror's packets be delay'd;
In sooth, I swear by holy Paul,
I'd burn book, preface, notes and all.
(II, 87-96)

The only other peace eulogy that can vie with the cheerfulness of Gay's poem is, not unexpectedly, the Preface to volume V of Wit and Mirth (1714). "Doctor Merriman" refers to the happy events of the preceding year and recommends his "incomparable Pills" as a remedy against the "quarrelsome Disposition" that blood and slaughter have produced in mankind.¹⁰⁴ The "Pills" will now heal possible breaches between the parties and cement unity. Bowzybeus, Gay's alter ego, was the kind of writer who contributed to the gay atmosphere of the Playford song-books, and the learned poet himself assumed a similar conciliatory attitude in his relationship with Whig and Tory friends, took the same cheerful view of divergences in criticism and politics, and was consequently as averse to lofty panegyric as to fierce satire.

The dedication of The Shepherd's Week, not to the Lord Treasurer and fellow Scriblerian, but to the chief peace negotiator was certainly not just mercenary. St. John and Gay were in a way kindred souls, and Bolingbroke's affection for "gentle Gay" survived the poet's death.¹⁰⁵ Besides, St. John seems, at least in later years, to have had an inclination for the Horatian manner of living, if we may believe the sincerity of his letter to Lord Bathurst¹⁰⁶ or of his rural taste manifested in the way he decorated his country house with pictures of rustic tools.¹⁰⁷ But he was also and above all a decided supporter of the "modern" observers and experimenters as against the followers of "metaphysical pneumatics" and "ontology",'08 and would therefore particularly appreciate Gay's Eclogues, which are "modern" in the peculiar sense that the word had in the period.

According to the Guardian rules, like Fontenelle's deduced by way of a "modern" method, pastoral poetry ought to picture a rural scene of perfect ease and tranquillity, where innocence, simplicity, and joy abound.¹⁰⁹ Both the "neoclassic" and the "rationalistic" critics rejected the "too much business and employment"¹¹⁰ of the countryside. Fontenelle had also represented the state of idleness, the demand of the senses, as a relief from "that presumptuous Tyrant of the Mind".¹¹¹ In France, both Ancients and Moderns could be said to cultivate the "Tyrant of the Mind". But the followers of Bacon and Newton in England opposed the dominance of Aristotelian metaphysics in a different way. They relied on experiment and observation, from the collected result of which conclusions were to be drawn about higher things. Not abstract Cartesian thinking, but industry, "mechanics", practical arts, husbandry, manual work and the evidence of the senses were their means of gradually arriving at the higher secrets, the mysteries of the existence of all things, body and soul as well as the universe. In reality, however, the final aim was sometimes lost sight of and very often certainly unheard of by many of those who enthusiastically and with painful detail reported discoveries, experiments and observations to the secretary of the Royal Society. Such details were appropriately condemned by critics and eschewed by poets who, according to Aristotelian principles for idealization in serious Kinds, only represented "a kind of half Truth". When, on the other hand, "Mechanicks" were admitted into the supposedly high Kinds and sublime style, as when in one of his Epics, Blackmore too meticulously described an angel's garment, that was designated as "Bathous".¹¹²

But poems about the countryside in Queen Anne's Golden Age, comic poems, images as up-to-date and as "modern" as the critical methods if not the poetry of the "rationalistic" school, could not picture a rural scene of ease and idleness, but had to represent industry, the low "Country Matters" which Fontenelle in particular despised, and the "too much business' that all the critics rejected. This was in accordance with what really happened, after the Peace Treaty, in particular. In a number of peace poems, the farmer had been praised happy for being able to carry on his work undisturbed by the ravages of war. Ease and "tranquillity" was not an ideal state of things in post-war England. It is perfectly logical then that in Gay's Prologue, Oxford is praised for providing opportunities for the industry of farmers and weavers, and that in Saturday,"¹¹³ a Theocritean description of English reapers, the same theme as in Rural Sports, but brought down to the level of rustic Bowzybeus, not "beheld" by the poet, corresponds to the picture of the return of the Golden Age in Virgil's Eclogue IV

It is also logical that Gay's "Eclogues", as he himself calls his poems, purport to imitate Theocritus's rusticity, English country occupations—not gentlemanly this time—but industrious swains and dairy-maids ploughing, haymaking and reaping the harvest, thrashing, tending the pigs and making butter and cheese. Bowzybeus, the rustic bard, is basically similar to the Greek bucolic poet, about whom Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote that he was not "a romantic writer" and that if he had been born in England, he would have written Idylls about "thrashing and churning".¹¹⁴ To Gay, the learned poet, however, the "image of the times" implied a comic genre picturing the details of various aspects in the period, among other things also the activities of pedants and experimental philosophers, in their way as "modern" as the aspirations toward English Augustan high Kinds and originality. As this aspect of The Shepherd's Week has not at all been dealt with in the previous criticism, it will receive a fairly extensive treatment here, particularly as it is entirely Scriblerian.

"Modern" and Low Pedantry

The most conspicuous "modern" features in The Shepherd's Week are the footnotes. According to the Prologue, notes "profound", most probably in the sense of "belonging to Bathous", were suggested by St. John. To the Scriblerians, such Bentleian pedantry deserved ridicule, and Gay thoroughly served the common cause by equating Bowzybeus and "modern" cranks.¹¹⁵ Most of the words commented upon¹¹⁶ are denoted as "Old Word" or "S[axon]" in contemporary dictionaries,¹¹⁷ one of which particularly shows the influence of "modern" philosophy. "Husbandry, Gardening, Confectionary, Cookery" are enumerated among the "Arts and Sciences" together with "Divinity, Law, Philosophy".¹¹⁸ In accordance with the etymological information and with the character of the poems, Gay's derivations of words annotated are "Saxon", "ancient British", or "Dutch". Sometimes the Virgilian Eclogues on which Gay's poems were modelled.¹¹⁹Monday is a regular singing-contest like Virgil's Eclogues III and VII or Theocritus's Idylls Vand VIII. Tuesday, a love-lament, is reminiscent of Eclogue II and part of Idyll III. The first song of Eclogue VIII seems to have provided the framework for Wednesday.—Two of Ovid's elegiac Epistles were, however, certainly also in Gay's mind, as is evidenced by imitative passages and the fact that the lament comes from women.¹²⁰—Thursday is a Pharmaceutria and corresponds to Eclogue VIII the second song, more than to Idyll II, the first song. Gay's version of the lament for Daphnis, Virgil's Eclogue V, is Friday.—Two shepherds lamenting the loss, though not death, of their mistress is, however, also treated of by Calpurnius in Ecloga Nona, or Nemesianus's Eclogue II.—Finally, Saturday is perhaps the most obvious and the cleverest imitation of Virgil, Eclogues IV and, mainly, VI. One passage is clearly an imitation of Mantuanus, whose rustic realism is also akin to Gay's. Into these moulds, Gay poured "modern" and other low subject matter from various sources, some of it certainly as he himself had observed it. All the poems are heavily sprinkled with echoes and borrowings, which in a masterly, truly neo-classical way, Gay adapted to his own and Bowzybeus's "modern" Eclogues. His footnotes, again in the "modern" manner, provide the clues to some of the classical passages imitated.¹²¹

There is some "modern" and Scriblerian subject matter in Monday, for instance. The wagers staked by the conventional shepherds, the "beechen cups" in Eclogue III, the goat and lamb, calf and pipe in the Idylls, Spenser's and Pope's more elaborate bowls in August and in Spring, all that is left aside for not only an "oaken staff a la Philips's, but also a realistically described tobacco-pouch. In Friday, Bumkinet refers to the autumn as the cyder-brewing season. The reason seems to be that cyder and tobacco were among the useful products supposed to be unknown to the Ancients and sometimes facetiously held to be among the advantages of the Moderns.¹²² The swing and the see-saw in the passages that Gay added in 1720, are Scriblerian playthings, which were allowed to Martin because they gave him "an early notion of the sciences"¹²³ They served Gay for an appropriate rustic version of the flaw in the innocence of a shepherd's character.¹²³ Lobbin Clout hung "the slacken'd cord" on "two near elms"

Now high, now low my Blouzelinda swung.
With the rude wind her rumpled garment rose,
And show'd her taper leg, and scarlet hose.
(II. 104–6)

Rustic Cuddy allowed himself similar innocent mischief when on "the plank" across "the fallen oak", he "pois'd" himself "against the tott'ring maid".

The delightful comparisons in the same Eclogue, Monday, could even suffer scrutiny by "modern" philosophers.

Leek to the Welch, to Dutchmen butter's dear,
Of Irish swains potatoe is the chear;
Oats for their feasts, the Scottish shepherds grind,
Sweet turnips are the food of Blouzelind.
While she loves turnips, butter I'll despise,
Nor leeks nor oatmeal nor potatoe prize.
(II. 83–88)

Cuddy's "landlord" eats roast-beef and the squire hare, the parson likes pudding and his wife fat capon, whereas Buxoma loves white-pot.

According to his own version of the law of decorum, Gay skilfully makes use of "modern" nutritional physiology. His distribution of the alimentary details follows Arbuthnot's prescription that "general Rules about Diet without Regard to particular Constitutions are absurd". The famous doctor recommended, for instance, milk and fresh eggs, "Decoctions and Creams or Gellies of well fermented Bread" to persons with "weak Fibres".¹²⁴ So what, in Cuddy's loving eyes, could better suit his Buxoma, to him the daintiest of creatures, than white-pot, which, according to the contemporary Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum by Kersey, was "a Mess of Milk with Eggs, fine Bread, Sugar, &c bak'd in an Earthen Pot". Similarly, in addition to the historic explanation why leek is the Welsh national emblem, there was a "modern" scientific theory which might support a physiological connection between the symbol and the national character. Leek was among the vegetables that "excite[d] a momentary Heat and Fever",¹²⁵ and "Taffy" was notoriously "hot and dry". As for Blouzelinda's turnips, the cultivation of these vegetables was an achievement of the Moderns, and a vegetarian diet seems to have been recommended by the new philosophers. In D'Urfey's Opera Wonders in the Sun,'¹²⁶ for instance, philosophers eat turnips and darrots, and King had ridiculed the use of turnips for food.¹²⁷ Cornelius Scriblerus, on the other hand, forbade Martin's nurse to eat beef, because it would spoil the understanding of Martin¹²⁸—That the words for food are important for the interpretation of Gay's poem is indicated by the fact that they were italicized in the first two editions of The Shepherd's Week.

The contents of the two stanzas referred to in Monday have no direct classical counterparts. Alimentary details belonged to Horace's Kinds, not to Eclogues. But in a simple "artless" form they are typical of Bowzybeus's repertoire, as for instance, the following lines.

While you eat goose and capon, I'le feed on beefe and bacon,
            And piece of hard cheese now and then;
We pudding have, and souse, always ready in the house.¹²⁹

Gay's details are, however, arranged in a perfect Virgilian Eclogue comparison, in the manner of Dryden's translation.

 The Poplar is by great Alcides worn:
The Brows of Phoebus his own Bays adorn.
The branching vine the jolly Bacchus loves.
The Cyprian Queen delights in Mirtle groves.
With Hazle, Phillis crowns her flowing Hair;
And while she loves that common Wreath to wear,
Nor Bays, nor Mirtle Bows, with Hazle shall compare.¹³⁰

Silenus's song in Eclogue VI was, however, the most rewarding for Gay's "modern" adaptation in Saturday. It had been the object of much discussion among critics for its non-pastoral sublimity. Fontenelle had made fun of "honest Silenus" and his "hearty Carouse" and also disapproved of the way in which Virgil had represented "philosophical Notions", the creation of the universe, according to were famous ballad figures, sometimes speaking Somerset dialect.¹³¹ The Index to the Roxburghe collection has at least ten titles about "West-Country" nymphs and lovers, weddings and wonders. Moreover, a Western lass, Gillian, who speaks "Zumerset", is a prominent character in D'Urfey's play The Bath, or, The Western Lass. Another evidence of Gay's dualistic decorum is his use of proverbs, "modern" as well as low. Dr. Bentley was notorious for his predilection for that stylistic device. John Ray published A Collection of English Proverbs (1670), and representatives of the Ancients had ridiculed the practice of their antagonists.¹³² Proverbs and "wise-saws" were, however, of old recognized as belonging to a low style. As regards pastoral poetry, Fontenelle had, of course, discarded both "trivial Comparisons" and "clownish proverbial sayings", because used by "real Shepherds".¹³³ But The Guardian recommended them as one of the ways in which the pastoral poet might "lawfully deviate from the ancients", obviously after Philips's example.¹³⁴

Antiquarian pedants concerned themselves not only with linguistic problems, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, but with the English past in its various aspects, even with Scandinavian history and literature.¹³⁵ The research of "modern" pedants into old customs, ancient as well as English, for instance, was made fun of by William King and the Scriblerians.¹³⁶ King ridiculed certain treatises on the "plays of the Grecian boys", which were supposed to correspond to English children's games.¹³⁷ For his description of homely rustic sports in Monday, Gay was obviously indebted to King's "Playford Letters", Playford, of course, being the name not only of an imaginary "modern" scholar, but of the patron of song-writers like Bowzybeus. Gay perhaps also had his eye on Budgell, who in The Spectator, No. 161, September 4, 1711, had compared cudgel-playing with Roman sports and referred to White Kennet for the relationship between country wakes and ancient love-feasts.¹³⁸ In his Eclogue, Gay represents the homely games as a field of achievement, in which rustic Colin and his companions excel. On the other hand, Lobbin Clout's blindman's buff probably reminded learned readers of how the Italian shepherdess Amaryllis, eyes bandaged, was left alone with her Myrtillo in a similar amorous situation.¹³⁹

"Modern" Natural Philosophy

There are also in Gay's poems allusions to the theories and the "learning" of the "modern" scientists. But these will best appear in comparisons of passages in The Shepherd's Week with corresponding lines in Gay's classical models, of which the reader will be reminded in passing. The rustic subject matter is in the spirit of Theocritus, but the outer mould in which it is cast was borrowed from other classical poets as well. Professor Jones and Dr. Bragg have identified there is a reference to a quotation from Chaucer, also in keeping with "modern" principles, as Chaucer was looked upon as the first refiner of the English language, which was supposed to have been in a state of progress up to the time of Waller and Dryden and to be subjected to those changes according to "modern" cyclic theories to which Gay alludes in the Proeme. A source of reference which Gay indicates, is "Ray. F.R.S.". It is from his Collection of English Words that the long footnote to 1. 89 in Wednesday is lifted and quoted literally.¹⁴⁰ The derivation of "Dight" is also taken from Ray, his section "North Country Words". The note to "Dumps" in Wednesday is in the real spirit of Martinus Scriblerus and his father Cornelius. There is one foreign and one native theory of derivation, the latter supposed to have been put forward by the "English Antiquaries", who "have conjectured that Dumps … comes from the word Dumplin, the heaviest kind of pudding that is eaten in this country, much used in Norfolk…" This is perhaps an echo from current theories about aliments and probably again from "Ray", who included Norfolk dumplings in his Collection of English Proverbs.¹⁴¹ Dirge" is annotated in a similar dual way with one Latin and one "Teutonic" origin. This time the quotation is literal except for the addition of the adjective "popish", meaning foreign, but also a term used in low anti-Jacobite argumentation.¹⁴²

The playful preference for the "Teutonic" antiquaries is, of course, in keeping with the "modern" Englishness of The Shepherd's Week Gay took his inspiration for this device from A Journey to London (1698), where William King, detractor of and learner from pedants, opposed his "Mr. Shuttleworth" to "M. Baudelot" in Lister's A Journey to Paris. The Frenchman was preparing a dissertation on a Greek marble with a list of the members of the Erecteis tribe killed by the Athenians, whereas the English pedant was ready to publish a report on a stone from Scotland with "a catalogue … of the most principal persons that were killed at Chevy Chase."¹⁴³ King's original intention seems to have been ridicule of pedantry on the whole. But it is worth observing that in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1709), he introduced a new edition of his Journey by representing it "as a vindication of [his] own country" against France, the enemy.¹⁴⁴ Similarly, in his rustic poems about the Tory Golden Age after the war with France, Gay appropriately gave the preference to the "Teutonic" school, so to speak, really native explanations.¹⁴⁵

To the supporters of "ancient" philosophy as well as to gentlemanly learned persons, some of the objects of the antiquarian interest, such as ballads,¹⁴⁶ seemed too insignificant to deserve serious attention. A common way of ridiculing the Moderns was therefore to imply that their learning was vulgar. Gay consistently carries out the principle of this double-natured decorum in his allusions to "modern" pedantry. In the footnotes, for instance, words like "ken", "doff', "don", which are represented as the object of the study of scholars, could at the same time also be recognized by readers as vulgar and naturally belonging to the vocabulary of Bowzybeus. The latter two are typical broadside ballad words. Both "modern" and low is also the footnote to 1. 21 in Tuesday, "Kee, a West-Country Word for Kine or Cows". Ray's Collection contains "South-Country" and "North-Country" words, but the "West-Country" lads and lasses "Epicurus's System".¹⁴⁷ Chetwood had tried to read Christian notions into the song and vindicated Silenus's drunken "Flights".¹⁴⁸

The Flights is exactly the sub-title of Saturday, a fact which in itself may be an indication that Gay was familiar with the dispute. He now efficiently brought Virgil's sublimity down to earth. "Modern" experimental philosophy provided the material for his version of the classical poet's passage about the causation and origin of things. The whole song reads like a table of contents in an issue of The Philosophical Transactions. At least one paper can be identified with certainty. William Derham, one of the most prominent members of the Royal Society, had reported on the "Migration of Birds" in "Letter", No. 313 (1708),¹⁴⁹ and King had referred to this in his Useful Transactions.¹⁵⁰ The nightly movements of owls, the sleeping habits of "bat and dormouse", the blindness of puppies, the mysteries of comets and glow-worms mentioned in Saturday, were all in the line of subjects treated in detail in the letters to the Royal Society. Richard Waller had actually reported on the "Flying Glow-Worm" in the Transactions,¹⁵¹ with King's subsequent ridicule, not so much of the glow-worm "volant",¹⁵² it seems, as of the style in which it was presented to the readers. "Our swain ", says Gay in a facetious footnote, "had possibly read Tusser, from whence he might have collected these philosophical observations." What the poet wants to say is, as in the case of some of the foot-notes, the proverbs and the ballads, that these "philosophical observations" were simple enough to be within the knowledge and understanding of "swains" and "huntsmen" and hardly deserved their epithet.¹⁵³ At the same time then such things as glow-worms and the "Will-a-Wisp" were within the range of a ballad poet's subject matter. The mention of the crude old Georgic is probably an allusion to what obviously seemed, even in Gay's time, a curious relationship, that between the useful arts and the new philosophy. Tusser was probably chosen because a new edition of his art of husbandry had appeared in 1713 under the title of Tusser Redivivus. The whole passage in Saturday is a clever "modernization" of Virgil, with some ridicule directed against exaggerated and blind-folded pedantry among the many amateur supporters of "modern" philosophy.

It has been said that Bowzybeus's song burlesques Blackmore's Creation, and, in particular, the song of Mopas in Prince Arthur.¹⁵⁴Eclogue VI must, however, be the origin of both songs, the subject matter of which is as philosophical as that of Creation. Blackmore, perhaps after Chetwood, combined the ancient Epicurean theory in Virgil with biblical notions and produced a "modern" version of the passage just as sublime as Virgil's. Both Gay and Blackmore imitated Virgil's, or rather Dryden's form. The following passage is a quotation from the English paraphrase of the Silenus.

He sung the secret Seeds of Nature's Frame,
How Seas, and Earth, and Air, and active Flame,
Fell through the mighty Void …
—
From thence the birth of Man the Song pursu'd,
And how the World was lost, and how renew'd.
—
He sung the lover's fraud …¹⁵⁵

All the elements in Mopas's song are to be found in Virgil's poem, chaos, orbs, vapours, earth, sea, plants, living things. Silenus was a sufficiently important figure in the criticism of the period to have provided the model for both Mopas and Bowzybeus. Moreover, in his Eclogue VIII, Diaper follows the same pattern in Proteus's song of "the World's first Birth" from "Chaos" and "Globules", making use of Epicurean atomic notions, Cartesian vortices, Newtonian gravity. Lines beginning "How", "He sung" also occur, and Gay echoes the last line.

When ruddy to the Waves, sunk the declining Day156

in

'Till, ruddy, like his face, the sun descends.
(1. 128)

The two serious poets make use of the physico-theology of the period, while in the comic manner, Gay resorts to the low "material things" of the experimental philosophy.

The inscription on Blouzelinda's tombstone in Friday,

Here Blouzelinda Iyes—Alas, alas!
Weep shepherds—and remember flesh is grass,
(II. 91-92)

is yet another "modernized" version of Virgil, in this case the epitaph on Daphnis in Eclogue V Prior's Hans Carvel¹⁵⁷ probably inspired the wording, but the contents are "modern" and Epicurean.¹⁵⁸

Finally, the "ALPHABETICAL CATALOGUE of Names, Plants, Flowers, Fruits, Birds, Beasts, Insects, and other material[!] things mentioned in these Pastorals" with which Gay closes The Shepherd's Week, is perhaps the most important evidence of the "modernness" of his Eclogues. His predecessors are here not classical poets, but Spenser and William King.¹⁵⁹ Gay certainly intended his Catalogue to serve a similar purpose in The Shepherd's Week as Spenser his Glossary in The Shepherd's Calendar. Just as Spenser emphasized the importance of his contribution of old English words to enriching the language not only of pastoral poetry, so Gay pointed to the significance of concrete words for lending colour to rural poetry. The use of dialect words was in the tradition of Renaissance critics,¹⁶⁰ but the use of words for "material things" was in the spirit of the English Moderns. The Baconians had created the antithesis between the things material, the concrete world of the new philosophy, and the "empty words" of the schoolmen; between, on one hand, manual work and the evidence of the senses, and, on the other hand, the work of the mind and abstractions. The understanding of Martinus, we know, a Modern to the point of perversion, "was so totally immers'd in sensible objects, that he demanded examples from Material things of the abstracted Ideas of Logick."¹⁶¹

Gay's Use of "Modern" Ballads

In order to appreciate the use of "Fables … Modern" in The Shepherd's Week in combination with echoes of the new philosophy, it may be useful to recall the position of the ballad in the early 18th century. By the time of the publication of Philips's first four Pastorals,¹⁶² the admiration for the "venerable ancient Song-Enditers"¹⁶³ had already begun to assert itself,¹⁶⁴ supported as it was by some congenial new or revived notions and ideas. Among these were the Longinian rehabilitation of genius in competition with learned "Art", of simplicity—even the "country-scraper['s]"—in rivalry with "artfulness", together with the activities of the English antiquaries, some of whom collected ballads, among other things.¹⁶⁵ Although more distantly, the appreciation of old songs was connected with the "modern" theory of cyclic changes, the Whig political principle of progress, and perhaps Augustan pride. It thus came to counteract the "ancient" notions of decay and even of imitation of classical poetry. Detractors of "modern" notions in general, but in particular of antiquarian pedantry, therefore often represented ballads as fit for the low taste of their antagonists, supposedly the same as that of the unlearned, learning, of course, consisting of classical knowledge. Grub Street and the new philosophy were not far apart.¹⁶⁶ In one of the parodies of Addison's ballad criticism, for instance, "the Polite Woodwardius" is said to have shed tears "upon reading some of the most pathetical Encounters of Tom Thumb." In his company are Tom D'Urfey and John Dunton.¹⁶⁷ Even before Addison had praised Chevy Chase, King had written about that ballad as suitable for the pedantry of his "Mr. Shuttleworth".¹⁶⁸

This relationship between ballads and the unlearned, in a double sense, was resorted to by Gay in Saturday, where with subtle playfulness, he expressed his scepticism about the serious admiration for the native genre and about the use of ballad "fables", as if they represented an English Golden Age. The poet probably owed part of his inspiration for the trick to Fontenelle, who disliked the whole of Silenus's song, not only the "philosophical notions", but also the ancient "fables".¹⁶⁹ Where Silenus tells the stories of Phaeton's sisters, Scylla, Pasiphae and Taurus, Bowzybeus entertains the merry reapers with ballads, that is to say, English "fables", two of which Addison had praised in rivalry with ancient poetry¹⁷⁰ and two of which had recently been used in serious plays.¹⁷¹ When the ballad-singer intoned Chevy Chase,¹⁷² as Gay writes, he appropriately "raised his voice" to "louder strains", as if to intimate the heroic quality of the song. The counterpart of the story of Pasiphae and the bull is Denham's song about the Quaker and the mare, All in the Land of Essex,'¹⁷⁴ and "Wantley's Dragon"'¹⁷⁵ is perhaps intended to correspond to Scylla and the "howling monsters" which girded her waist. There is "Taffey Welch "¹⁷⁶ and "Sawney Scot", "Lilly-burlero¹⁷⁷ and the Irish Trot"¹⁷⁸ "Bateman"¹⁷⁹ and "Shore"¹⁸⁰ "The bow'r of Rosamond "¹⁸¹ and "Robin Hood"¹⁸² and the song which significantly describes "how the grass now grows where Troy town stood".¹⁸³ It is a catalogue of ballads, similar to those hung on the walls of Baucis's and Philemon's cottage in Swift's poem, some of them "vulgar", others "traditional", "Fables … Modern", but also fit to entertain maidens and swains.

The view of the English past as pre-Augustan was perhaps the reason why ballads were more or less facetiously linked with Greek poetry, the products of supposed natural genius. In Fontenelle's New Dialogues of the Dead, Anacreon is called a "petty Ballad-maker" or in Hughes's translation, "a little Scribbler of Sonnets".¹⁸⁴ The Muses Mercury accused Perrault, another French Modern, of treating Homer as "a common Ballad-maker"¹⁸⁵ and when in A Journey to London, William King called Chevy Chase "a noble Pindaric", the intention was plainly derogatory. Similarly, Addison's comparison of D'Urfey to Pindar is rather condescending.¹⁸⁶ It was, however, with a true flair for business that Curll adopted this method when he advertised the second edition of Theocritus's Idylliums as "Love-Dialogues, &c¹⁸⁷ This sort of "modern" advertising method, though in the reverse, was continued by the author of the Preface to A Pill to Purge State-Melancholy (1715), who pushed his "Dittys" by referring to ancient Kinds as ballads, shepherd's songs or "Love-Sonnets", the "Ploughman's Ditty's", and "Catches".¹⁸⁸ So why—that is the conclusion—be ashamed of publishing a collection of broadside ballads?"¹⁸⁹

Broadside verse was what actually became of the medieval "Balades", "Compleyntes, Roundelets, Dities, Rondils" in which Chaucer's Franklin excelled. When they were removed from the list of the recognized Kinds, they did not altogether disappear, nor did they all develop into something more Augustan. Like so many other fashions and currents of taste, they ended up at the bottom of the scale of aesthetics and of society. The unlearned writers of broadsheet ballads as well as the "sonnetee, r" of the period, Thomas D'Urfey, used the old appellations without much discrimination of their inherent qualities. Sub-titles like "A New Sonnet" and "An Excellent New Ditty", "A Doleful Ditty" and "A Pleasant Pastoral Sonnet" are common in all ballad collections, and there are titles like The Swain's Complaint, The Milke-Maid's Dumps and The Lyke-Wake Dirge,¹⁹⁰ none indicating the form, though some the mode or the manner. In D'Urfey's Opera Don Quixote, a shepherd and a shepherdess sing a "Dirge". When in The Second Pastoral, Philips referred to Colinet's poem as "sonnets" and "ditties", he seriously aimed at the effect of the "venerable ancient Song-Enditers". But in the case of The Shepherd's Week, the words "sonnet", "madrigal", "ballads", "roundelays", "catches",¹⁹¹ have different semantic values. Playfully following the habits of broadsheet poets and his fellow-"sonneteer", but with a thorough knowledge of classical Kinds, Gay in his disguise called his lovelaments after the model of Eclogues II and VIII and Ovid, Tuesday; or, The Ditty and Wednesday; or, The Dumps. The Spell and The Flights are the "homebred" versions of the classical Pharmaceutria, respectively the Pollio and the Silenus, both sublime. Finally, the funeral Elegy is a Dirge.'¹⁹² The duality of the genre is thus facetiously but openly announced.

Themes Otherwise Anglicized and Brought Down to Earth

Sometimes homely songs and classical poems were interrelated, the former perhaps imitations of imitations, rather than of originals. In other cases, themes probably imitated human nature in general. There was some justification for the "modern" comparison of ballads with classical Kinds. Passages in Gay's poems sometimes seem indebted to both. But in each case, they retain their own peculiar quality of gentle and delicate mock-pastoral with charming details, an earthy but agreeable realism, set off for a contrast in particular against melancholy or sublime themes in similar genres.¹⁹³ Like Alexis in Eclogue II, for instance, Nell in The Countrey-Farmer tempts her beloved with gifts and the prospect of her accomplishments.¹⁹⁴ The descriptions of the latter recall similar passages in Tuesday. Marian's "wailings" in Gay's poem are also reminiscent of one of D'Urfey's songs about "Sawney".¹⁹⁵ But the woman's reproachful reminder, so to speak, is at the same time typical of Heroides. The following quotations may serve to illustrate this relationship. The first is from Tuesday, the second and third are from the two songs.

  Whilom with thee 'twas Marian's dear delight
To moil all day, and merrymake at night.
If in the soil you guide the crooked share,
Your early breakfast is my constant care.
And when with even hand you strow the grain,
I fright the thievish rooks from off the plain,
In misling days when I my thresher heard,
With nappy beer I to the barn repair'd;
Lost in the musick of the whirling flail,
To gaze on thee I left the smoking pail;
In harvest when the Sun was mounted high,
My leathern bottle did thy drought supply;
When-e'er you mow'd I follow'd with the rake,
And have full oft been sun-burnt for thy sake;
When in the welkin gath'ring show'rs were seen,
I lagg'd the last with Colin on the green;
And when at eve returning with thy carr,
Awaiting heard the gingling bells from far;
Strait on the fire the sooty pot I plac't,
To warm thy broth I burnt my hands for haste.
When hungry thou stood'st staring like an Oaf
I slic'd the luncheon from the barley loaf,
With crumbled bread I thicken'd well thy mess.
Ah, love me more, or love thy pottage less!
(II. 49-73)

And He [churn the] milk, and thou shalt mowe,
le card and He spin, while you harrow and sowe,
And call upon Dobbin with Hey-ye-woe!

I gave him fine Scotch Sark and band, I put them on
                         with mine own hand;
I gave him Honey and I gave him Land;
—
I robb'd the groves of all their store and nosegays
                made to give Sawney one.

Ovid's Oenone and Paris lay on leaves and flowers and on straw in the shade, all of which the woman recalled after her lover left her.

When you rose up to hunt, I shew'd you Game,
Surpriz'd the Infant Savage and his Dame:
Companion of your Sports, the Toils did place,
And chear'd the swift pac'd Hounds upon the Chace.¹⁹⁶

In the burlesque version, the lovers meet in the stable and "on a Truss of Hay". After Paris has left her, Oenone remembers how her admirer has been promoted from the stable "to the table".

Did I not teach you then to lay a Cloath?
There's no Man but must have his first Beginning,
Who learnt you then to fold your Table-Linnen?
Did you not often when the Cloath was spread
Just in the middle put your Salt and Bread?
[You did not know how to fill a glass]
Did I not show you how to broach your Drink?
And tilt the Vessel when 't began to sink?¹⁹⁷

Man and woman are the same at all times, and Gay knew both Ovid, Radcliffe, D'Urfey and his fellow-creatures. Besides, another contemporary pastoralist who tried to vary the conventional pattern, had just produced yet another version.

Oft have I wound in Plaits the yielding Reed,
And plac'd the well-wrought Garland on your Head.
Oft have I choicest Fish with Labour caught
And the sweet Prey to you a present brought.¹⁹⁸

Another of Ovid's Epistles was certainly in Gay's mind when he wrote Wednesday. Phillis to Demophon invited burlesque, at least the English translation of the passage that describes the maiden's hesitation before the lover's leap

Hard by, where two huge Mountains guard the Way,
There lies a fearful, solitary Bay;
Oft I've resolv'd, while on this Place I've stood,
To throw my self into the raging Flood,
Wild with Despair, and I will do it still,
Since you continue thus to use me ill.
And when the kinder Waves shall waft me o'er,
May thou behold my Body on the Shore¹⁹⁹
Unburied lye; and though thy Cruelty
Harder than Stone, or than thy self should be,
Yet shalt thou cry, astonish'd with the Show,
Phillis, I was not to be follow'd so.
Raging with Poisons would I oft expire,
And quench my own by a much happier Fire.
Then to revenge the Loss of all my Rest,

Would stab thy Image in my tortur'd Breast.200

The last choice is hanging, and then Phillis composes her own epitaph. Surely, Prior was right, even for a joke, to prefer D'Urfey to such translations. But by combining the realism of songs and ditties with this classical theme, Gay produced an English picture of womanly irresolution set off against a background of pigs, curs, and the village pond.

A sudden death shall rid me of my woe.
This penknife keen my windpipe shall divide.
What, shall I fall as squeaking pigs have dy'd!
No—To some tree this carcass I'll suspend.
But worrying curs find such untimely end!²⁰¹
I'll speed me to the pond, where the high stool
On the long plank hangs o'er the muddy pool,
That stool, the dread of ev'ry scolding quean;
Yet, sure a lover should not dye so mean!
There plac'd aloft, I'll rave and rail by fits,
Though all the parish say I've lost my wits;
And thence, if courage holds, myself I'll throw,
And quench my passion in the lake below.²⁰²
(II. 100-12)

Virgil's sublime passages were treated by Gay in the same irreverent manner as the theme of the forsaken lover's melancholy end. Friday is a proper Answer, particularly in this respect, to the many conventional imitations of Eclogue V, of which The Guardian complained. In all those that copy the traditional pattern, the lament for the dead shepherd is followed by the apotheosis, which is usually indicated by another shepherd pointing to the sun breaking through a streak in the clouds. Spenser's Dido in November really becomes a goddess in the Elysian Fields. There were also some 18th century variations, such as Congreve's in The Mourning Muse of Alexis, where a flame from the tomb of the dead shepherdess extends to heaven and fixes in the firmament as a new star.²⁰³ Philips's Albino, whose death is accompanied by no heathen paraphernalia, looks down "from above", more like a representative of the new English Christian-Platonic supernatural. But Gay performs the transition from sorrow to rejoicing through a wholesale reversal of the conventional pattern. In the delightful funeral scene, correct after Virgil and Rapin, but realistic and more elaborate even than Mantuan's,²⁰⁴ the deification is negligently hinted at in passing in the parson's sermon.

He said, that heaven would take her soul, no doubt.
(1. 141)²⁰⁵

The louts "wail'd", it is true, and in a cumulative comparison, which is rustic, but basically similar to that which accompanies the vows of Virgil's shepherds, they swore to praise Blouzelinda "for ever". In reality, however, these mortal swains remember their promises and their grief only

'Till bonny Susan sped a-cross the plain;
They seiz'd the lass in apron clean array'd,
And to the ale-house forc'd the willing maid;
In ale and kisses they forget their cares,
And Susan Blouzelinda's loss repairs.
(II. 160-64)²⁰⁶

The address to D'Urfey in Wednesday is another de-sublimed Virgilian passage and imitates the panegyric to Pollio in Eclogue VIII. Pollio's consulship was supposed to bring back "the reign of Saturn", and as in Gay's period D'Urfey was the most prolific writer of pastoral poems about contemporary shepherds, the implication is obviously that Queen Anne's reign was the new Golden Age.

The most conspicuous example of anti-sublimity is Saturday, an imitation of Eclogues IV and V, which most critics considered too sublime for the pastoral Kind. Gay starts with an invocation.

SUBLIMER strains, 0 rustick Muse, prepare;
Forget a-while the barn and dairy's care;
Thy homely voice to loftier numbers raise,
The drunkard's flights require sonorous lays.
(II. 1-4)

The "loftier numbers" were indeed efficiently brought down to earth in Gay's rustic and "modern" versions of the Golden Age and of the "causes of things" and in the catalogue of English "fables"²⁰⁷. Just as Rapin had justified Silenus's song as the subject matter of pastoral poetry by saying that the audience were shepherds, so Gay in his turn could "answer" Virgil's most sublime Eclogue with a ballad-singer's repertoire and allege as his excuse that Bowzybeus sang to maidens and swains, whose literary craving was actually satisfied with Dunton's and Cross's broadsheets.

Devices from Low Literature

The concrete realistic quality of The Shepherd's Week was achieved not only by means of borrowings from and allusions to the productions and the activities of experimenters and antiquaries, by the description of "material things" observed and by a purposeful choice of models, realistic and sublime passages in Theocritus, Virgil, Ovid and Mantuan for imitation and parody, respectively. In accordance with their sub-titles, Gay's poems also contain general characteristics of and details from the sort of literature that could be supposed to be familiar to Bowzybeus, the rustic bard. The naming of the Eclogues after the days of the week, for instance, is not just in the manner of Spenser, as Gay pretented. The calendar motif had deep roots in popular literature with, perhaps after Hesiod, certain days propitious and others not, for certain sorts of work or important events.²⁰⁸ Gay had been anticipated in applying it to loving and wooing both by William Basse²⁰⁹ and an anonymous ballad poet.²¹⁰ Like Philips, Gay gave his characters pastoral names that had been used by Spenser and his immediate followers, Basse and Wither, as well as by Abel Evans and D'Urfey. But whereas Philips added French-sounding names to the native ones, Gay drew on English sources. Blouzelinda is obviously an invention in the spirit of D'Urfey,²¹¹ whereas Hobnelia, Buxoma, Sparabella, Grubbinol, Bumkinet, Lubberkin recall contemporary coinages like Basketia, Thirsto, Drowtho in King's The Furmetary and Tarbox, Lowbell, two of the characters in the rustic anti-masque of D'Urfey's Cynthia and Endimion.²¹² They are pastoral, but at the same time in the comic English tradition that Gay followed in some of his plays.

The examples of superstition in Thursday are also thoroughly low and Northern, if not English, as appears, for instance, from a comparison with Lansdowne's version of the Pharmaceutria. If they have a literary source, it could only be the chap-books. Flinging hemp-seeds or peels over one's head or shoulder,²¹³ putting peascods over or under one's door,²¹⁴ throwing apple and orange peels, so that they form a certain letter of the alphabet, turning round in a circle,²¹⁵ counting the spots of a lady-bird, listening to the first cuckoo in spring²¹⁶ are all more or less well-known as means for simple and popular divination. Midsummer Eve and May Day are perhaps more important in Scandinavia, but the 14th of February is still a thoroughly English "Day", although the Valentine wooing has now become commercial as much as romantic. Gay's story about Hobnelia's visit to the "pothecary's shop" in order to buy "golden flies" is obviously, on the other hand, an "image of the times".²¹⁷ For one or two of the descriptions of traditional spells as well as for the picture of the fortune-telling gypsies in Tuesday, Gay might have found support in respectable old English poetry,²¹⁸ although the latter colourful passage was perhaps directly inspired by one of the Spectator essays.²¹⁹

 Last Friday's eve, when as the sun was set,
I, near you stile, three sallow gypsies met.
Upon my hand they cast a poring look,
Bid me beware, and thrice their heads they shook,
They said that many crosses I must prove,
Some in my worldly gain, but most in love.
Next morn I miss'd three hens and our old cock,
And off the hedge two pinners and a smock.²²⁰
(II, 73-80)

As opposed to the Naiads and Nymphs, to Venus and Diana in Pope's Pastorals,²²¹ the "theology" of The Shepherd's Week is indeed English, ingeniously adapted to the simplicity of swains and maidens, and just as proper for Queen Anne's Golden Age as the "hob-thrushes, fairies, goblins, and witches" that the Guardian essay, No. 30, recommended. Like The Spectator about Sir Roger's credulity, but unlike older English poetry about "gypsan" ladies, the description of Marian's experiences could also teach a sophisticated town reader something about the folly of trusting to palmistry in love-affairs and other forms of superstition.

Among the characteristics of low poetry in The Shepherd's Week are some stylistic features, such as burthens, cumulative comparisons and similes, repetitions and absurdities, which, however, belong to both ballads, Idylls and Eclogues. Ballads sometimes have series of comparisons or incremental repetitions with little regard to decorum or even to contents.²²² But Gay used all these ornaments artistically. Even a burthen was made into a product of "Art",²²³ and his comparisons in Monday are woven into intricate "figures", reminiscent of poems by Bolton,²²⁴ Quarles, and Henry King.²²⁵ Certain stock phrases, elements and themes are borrowed from ballads, others from contemporary songs. One of the instruments which Sparabella considers as a means by which to shorten her unhappy life is the "pen-knife", that is to say, the "wee pen-knife" or "little pen-knife" of Scottish ballads,²²⁶ the "Poynard" of a later song.²²⁷ The "nuncupative" testament in Friday is another ballad element,²²⁸ which has no classical counterpart, but which occurs, for instance, in Spenser's Daphnaida in a highly idealized form. It was popular enough to be used in burlesque satire.²²⁹ A serious version occurs in The Bride's Buriall, which was "kept in print from the time of James I down to the [19th] century",²³⁰ and which was also published in Philips's Collection of Old Ballads. Its testament does not actually contain more than one item, but Blouzelinda's will is full of comic realistic detail. She gives directions for the care of her poultry and the "sickly calf and then shows her mother

                       yonder shelf,
There secretly I've hid my worldly pelf.
Twenty good shillings in a rag I laid,
Be ten the Parson's, for my sermon paid.
The rest is yours—my spinning-wheel and rake,
Let Susan keep for her dear sister's sake;
My new straw-hat that's trimly lin'd with green,²³¹
Let Peggy wear, for she's a damsel clean.
My leathern bottle, long in harvests try'd,

Be Grubbinol's—this silver ring beside:
Three silver pennies, and a ninepence bent,
A token kind, to Bumkinet is sent.
Thus spoke the maiden, while her mother cry'd,
And peaceful like the harmless lamb she dy'd.²³²
(II. 119–32)

Various details, such as the incident with Susan and her garter in Saturday and the "stool", "the dread of ev'ry scolding quean", in Wednesday, were borrowed by Gay from less serious "ditties".²³³ The fairs with their rope-dancing, mountebank performances and glittering "pedlars stalls" described in Saturday, were trivial events, which were depicted in street ballads and which were among the specialities of artists like Hogarth and D'Urfey.²³⁴ The Wit and Mirth volumes contain a number of songs about haymakers and reapers, refreshing themselves from a "Leather Bottle", like Colin Clout in Tuesday, or saluting a maid's mother in the language of Gay's Hobnelia, "[I] doft my Hat".²³⁵ There are threshers and gallant swains, industrious maidens²³⁶ and girls with "ruddy Cheeks and Nut-brown Hair",²³⁷ although there were similar creatures in older English literature as well. An admirer attacking a maiden's virtue, as in Wednesday, is the slightly varying subject matter of the popular Northern Ditty, beginning "Cold and Raw",²³⁸ but the theme is, of course, not D'Urfey's invention. In similar genre, but in a different mode of imitation, it occurs, for instance, in William Browne's The Shepherd's Pipe.²³⁹ By means of the italicized quotations in Friday²⁴⁰ and Saturday, the list of ballads and songs at the end of the latter Eclogue, and the tribute to D'Urfey in Wednesday,²⁴¹ Gay drew the reader's attention to his familiarity with low poetry. The learned part of the audience were perhaps expected to remember a line in Eclogue VIII, part of the model for the latter passage, "a te principium, tibi desinam". As a confession of indebtedness to low poets in general, it was literally true.

Relationship with Earlier English Poetry

It is not only for its subject matter, but also for its tone of mirth and gaiety that The Shepherd's Week is indebted to songs, in particular D'Urfey's. But its "spice of humour and light-heartedness", it has been said, also "carries back to Nicolas Breton and earlier Elizabethans."²⁴² For a number of the borrowings we can also look beyond D'Urfey, which to some extent diminishes the value attached to the evidence and the conclusions that have been drawn from similarities with contemporary songs.²⁴³ Lobbin Clout's vow in Monday for instance,

Ah Blouzelind! I love thee more by half,
Than does their fawns, or cows the new-fall'n calf.
(II. 15-16)seems to echo a passage in Fletcher's
                     The Faithful Shepherdess.

I love thee better than the careful ewe
The new-wean'd lamb, that is of her own hew.²⁴⁴

The importance to lovers of having a sweet breath in the days of neglected dental care was reflected in poetry before Gay's time. Thomas Overbury's milkmaid has a breath "like a new made Haye-cocke",²⁴⁵ and Hero was thought to smell of flowers when "'twas the odour which her breath forth cast".²⁴⁶ Again, Greene's Carmela in Menaphon "wiped her mouth with her white apron before kissing",²⁴⁷ whereas with Blouzelinda the same gesture implies content with the lover's boldness. The "cocked haye" serves for a pastoral shady grove in Spenser's November,²⁴⁸ but also and more appropriately in Gay's Monday with its early summer pictures of primroses, king-cups and daisies. Like Alexander Barclay, Gay could mix a georgic element into his Eclogues. But whereas Virgil's husbandman observes how the heifer "looks up to heaven" and "snuffs the breeze", Cloddipole can tell a shower by noticing the heifer's tail, just as, in Elizabethan times, Alcon could "save a penny in almanacks" because of his cow, whose "verie taile was a kalender". His little boy could foretell a storm, "if she had but set vp her tayle".²⁴⁹

Furthermore, English country sports, wrestling, pitching the bar and throwing "the weightie fledge", were traditional elements in English pastoral poetry from Barclay's and Ben Jonsons's time.²⁵⁰ The haggard face of Marian, resembling "ashes, leather, oatmeal, bran and chalk", is described in a comically expanded echo from The Knight's Tale,²⁵¹ and when Gay compared the "wan complexion" of Clumsilis to "the withered leek", he again resorted to a good old English simile, used by Greene in Doron's Eclogue and by Sidney in A Remedie for Love.²⁵² Another favourite old tag is "blubber'd", about pouting lips and a face drenched with tears.²⁵³ The description of Love as "some bloody butcher's son" harks back to Shakespeare more than to Theocritus or Virgil.²⁵⁴ Glow-worms had raised the curiosity of people before the time of the "modern" pedants, a fact which was reflected in poems before Saturday,²⁵⁵ and the "green gown" is a tag in ditties, not only D'Urfey's,²⁵⁶ but it also belongs to poetry and plays by Robert Greene, Ben Jonson, Browne, Herrick.²⁵⁷ The "hundredth psalm" among the ballads in Saturday alludes to the metaphor with which Mrs. Ford illustrates the incompatibility of Falstaff s "disposition" with "the truth of his words", "the Hundredth Psalm to the tune of Green Sleeves".²⁵⁸

The italicized phrases in Friday—"Hang sorrow", "wash sorrow from thy soul", "cast away our care"—are all quotations from drinking-songs,²⁵⁹ literal or rendered with just that slight variation which shows that Gay was familiar enough with the cheerful songs of tavern-hunters to quote from memory. But a hundred years earlier, a kindred spirit had availed himself of the same printer's device to emphasize his light-hearted mood. It is in fact not only this carpe diem echo that A Christmas Carroll has in common with The Shepherd's Week. George Wither's descriptions are as low and as rustic as Gay's, though of a different season, door-posts decorated with ivy and holly, meat roasting in ovens and turning on spits, lads playing on "a Bag-pipe and a Tabor", and

Brisk Nell hath brought a Ruffe of Lawne,
With droppings of the Barrell.

The characters in The Shepherd's Week may seem indebted to D'Urfey's lads and lasses, but they are also descendants of Overbury's happy milkmaid, of Tusser's ideal housewife,²⁶⁰ of Lucy in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.

Into the milk-house went I with the maid,
And there amongst the cream-bowls did she shine,
As Pallas, 'mongst her princely housewif ry:
She turn'd her smock over her lily arms,
And div'd them into milk to run her cheese.

It is the King who describes Lucy, whereas Blouzelinda's obituary is spoken by simple Bumkinet.

  If by the dairy's hatch I chance to hie,
I shall her goodly countenance espie,
For there her goodly countenance I've seen,
Set off with kerchief starch'd and pinners clean.
Sometimes, like wax, she rolls the butter round,
Or with the wooden lilly prints the pound.
Whilome I've seen her skim the clouted cream,
And press from spongy curds the milky stream.
(II. 55-62)

To sum up—as on previous occasions or in similar circumstances, Gay wrote "something [lower]" than other contemporary poets of some renown, here pastoralists of various kinds. The Shepherd's Week was certainly suggested by the Guardian papers and is related to them in a way similar to that in which there is a relationship between Addison's "Essay on the Georgics" and other poems by Gay. But the Eclogues need not therefore be interpreted as directly ridiculing either poets, poetry or poetical characters. As in so many other cases, they reveal Gay's taste for experimenting, for writing something different, something non-conventional, and at the same time, they disclose his attitude towards altercations among literary critics, too serious perhaps in the opinion of Gay, who knew that rules do not make a poet.

Gay demonstrated his position both where the pastoral genre, the notion of the Golden Age and the veneration for ballads were concerned. In respect of the ballad, the poet neither condemned nor unduly venerated it, whether popular or traditional. As a merry young man, flute-player and partaker in country-dancing, he could don the ballad-singer's leathern jacket as naturally as Dr. Corbett. As he showed, not only in The Shepherd's Week, respectable and "artful" poetry could profit from the realistic and colourful picturesqueness of the vernacular genre. The tenets of both "neoclassic" and "rationalistic" serious criticism of pastoral poetry are treated irreverently and with naive common sense by the unlearned rustic bard, Gay's alter ego. Some fun is directed against the "rationalistic" as well as "neoclassic" notion of the ease and tranquillity of shepherds, some also against exaggerated "modern" pedantry and the supposedly vulgar preoccupation with the details of natural science. As against both the "ancient" concept of a Golden Age and the "modern" notion of a Golden future, Gay facetiously set his simple eulogy of Queen Anne's Golden Age.

The "modernity" of the subject matter is obvious in the emphasis on industry, low from an "ancient" point of view, in the philosophical passages with borrowings from the productions of the English "Moderns"²⁶¹ and in the substitution of a partly purposeful selection of ballad fictions for "ancient" stories in the passage imitating the Silenus. But the most important feature is the glossary. Like Spenser's obsolete words in Glosses, Gay's words for "material things" are collected in a Catalogue and their use emphasized as a novelty, indeed a change from the "purling streams" and the "shady groves". Here Gay is certainly serious. The taste for concrete and pictorial rustic subject matter must have been on the increase, witness not only Philips's and Evans's Pastorals, but also a poem called The Smock-Race at Finglass in Steele's Miscellany and rural songs and ballads printed in the later editions of the Dryden Miscellanies.

Some of Gay's subject matter a la Theocritus and Mantuan was certainly the result of direct observation. Sometimes it seems to have been inspired by or borrowed from, and was in any case related to that of ballads and other low productions as well as older English, and, from a neo-classical point of view, not very respectable poetry. It was not the first time that Gay profited from or manifested his relationship with low verse and prose. The reason why his indebtedness sometimes seems to lie both with the latter and with older English poetry, is perhaps that the broadside quality of poetry must have been the link that kept the 16th and 17th century tradition of song and pastoral poetry alive during a period when conventional imitation of classical poems was practised by poets and poetasters.

The low subject matter of varying origin is formed into learned and "artful" Eclogues, imitating and echoing Virgil, Theocritus, Ovid. As might be expected, it is in particular the sublime and melancholy passages in the models that are brought down to earth and common sense by way of parodical realistic Answers. As the poems represent the "image of the times", Queen Anne's Golden Age, they may be characterized as "Comi-Pastoral" Eclogues, as usual a mixed Kind. In this mock-genre, the use of abundant comic detail is correctly justified. But the "true spirit of pastoral poetry" is due above all to Gay's dairy-maids, who are raised to fulfil the requirements for pastoral characters.²⁶² Like the happy angler in Rural Sports, they are typically English and admirably suited in poems that celebrated the period of peace after the wars with France.

Gay was of the same school of "Art" as Pope and undoubtedly admired the latter's poems. But he never wrote anything that resembled his friend's Pastorals. Like most young gentlemen of the period, he did write pastoral songs, but they all contain realistic details.²⁶³ The difference between Philips's Pastorals Shepherd's Week is, the mode of imitation apart, the extreme "artfulness" of the latter poem with its close imitation and its wealth of echoes and borrowings. Gay did not anglicize a Kind in the sense intended by Addison and the Guardian critic of pastoral poetry. He mixed Kinds, Comedy and pastoral Eclogue, relied on precedents in English poetry and borrowed from classical poetry and low verse.

Gay was probably amused at the pretensions of Philips and his friends in alluding to the Pastorals as a prelude to Epic, poems which were copies rather than imitations or, conversely, pretended to originality, in reality the "country-scraper['s]" simplicity. The Shepherd's Week serves the same purpose as Pope's Guardian, No. 40. But as in the case of the essay on genius, the touch of ridicule is light, and we are at the same time led to enjoy the poet's low things. By referring to Milton and quoting one of the epic poet's colourful similes, Gay seems to have disclaimed promises about the future similar to Philips's and Pope's and declared in the spirit of Horace that his genius was "of a lower order", capable of description and not fit for epic invention. Yet in contrast to Philips and even more than Pope, Gay consistently followed his own genius and in the Fables really achieved "something greater", something of a character that may be said to have been foreshadowed in his Eclogues. The old shepherd in the introductory Fable who draws his wisdom from nature, the life of plants and animals, seems to have been anticipated in the character of cheerful Bowzybeus, Gay's alter ego in The Shepherd's Week.

That Bowzybeus who could sweetly sing,
Or with the rozin'd bow torment the string;
That Bowzybeus who with finger's speed
Could call soft warblings from the breathing reed;
That Bowzybeus who with jocund tongue,
Ballads and roundelays and catches sung.²⁶⁴

The same tendencies as in the early works are manifested in Gay's complimentary poems, both in An Epistle to a Lady, like Rural Sports a counterblast to panegyric on a public event, and in other Epistles of a more private character.²⁶⁵ The familiarity and the "Art" of the former poem are in efficient contrast to the lofty genres and the supposedly inspired products published on the same occasion, this time the arrival in England of the new royal family from Hanover. The hollowness of the eulogy was the more conspicuous since to the British in general the event was at once more negligible and less welcome than the Peace Treaty in the preceding year. To Gay personally, it meant the end of his diplomatic mission and of his success at court. The Whigs were back in power. Even more than before, then, the poet had reason to protest against poetic loftiness and inspiration.

All the Epistles are of the Horatian variety, but constructed after different models, such as the Ovidian contention between a high and a low Kind—directly or by way of Cotton's imitation—travel accounts, a river trip after Ariosto, even "punctual History". In neither of them is there anything of the "sort of inspiration" which Mr. Spectator could find characteristic of an Epistle by a Whig poet or which an earlier Whig warbler had demurely, but deliberately aimed at in an epistolary eulogy of Marlborough. Instead there is plenty of "Art" and learning. In An Epistle to a Lady, Gay even demonstrated directly the threadbareness of what was supposed to be inspired panegyric, but was in reality outworn convention. The charming informal welcome addressed to a friend in the poem to Pope was intended to set off the supposedly enthusiastic, but in fact coldly ceremonial celebrations of the arrival of Kings and plenipotentiaries. Its background matter, part of which had been relegated to low taste by one of the representatives of the "high seriousness", must have been designed as a contrasting effect. Other Epistles are travellers' accounts of insignificant things observed—a lady's jewels and her cosmetic art, a female barber's gewgaws and "Honiton's" "finest lace",²⁶⁶ commonplace scissors and elbow-chairs, "stony lanes" and "shrubby heaths"—all of which counterbalance reports of more dignified sights. The subject matter is sometimes low enough to carry the reader's thought to simple songs and prose tales, periodicals and travel books. Borrowings are often obvious or the source even indicated. Now and then the relationship with older English prose or poetry is apparent. In particular the longer Epistles display characteristics which in some form or other are to be found in the rest of Gay's poetry.

Notes

¹Tatler, No. 9, April 30, 1709.

²The Beauties of English Poesy, ed. Oliver Goldsmith, 2 vols., London, 1767, I, 133. Reference in Congleton, op. cit., p. 146.

³Lives, II, 282.

⁴ Prose passage prefixed to English Eclogues, in Poetical Works, 10 vols., London, 1837-38, III, 2.

⁵ Congleton, op. cit., p. 136.

⁶ In his article on Gay in the DNB.

⁷ R. T. Kerlin, Theocritus in English Literature, Lynchburg, Virg., 1910, p. 57.

⁸Pastoral Influence in the English Drama, Philadelphia, 1898, p. 456.

⁹ Letter to Caryll, June 8, 1714, Pope, Correspondence, I, 229. Quoted, for instance, by Sherburn, Alexander Pope, p. 121.

¹⁰ Pope, Works, ed. Elwin and Courthope, 10 vols., London, 1871-89, I, 234.

¹¹Alexander Pope, pp. 114 ff.—Cf. H. G. de Maar, A History of Modern English Romanticism, Oxford, 1924, pp. 105-6; C. Kerby-Miller, editor of The Memoirs of … Martinus Scriblerus, New Haven, 1950, p. 221; Edna L. Steeves in her edition of The Art of Sinking in Poetry, New York, 1952, p. xv; Smithers, op. cit., p. 325, to mention a few examples.

¹² Op. cit., in Spenser, Works, ed. Grosart, III, xliii.

¹³ Elizabeth Nitchie, Vergil and the English Poets, New York, 1919, p. 173.

¹⁴ R. F. Jones, "Eclogue Types in English Poetry", JEGP, XXIV, 1925, p. 49.

¹⁵ Op. cit., pp. 110-12.

¹⁶ Diaper, Complete Works, pp. xxxviii-xxxix.

¹⁷ R. A. Brower, Alexander Pope, The Poetry of Allusion, Oxford, 1959, p. 24.

¹⁸John Gay, pp. 82-83.

¹⁹ Armens, op. cit., p. 161.

²⁰ H. Trowbridge, "Pope, Gay, and The Shepherd's Week", MLQ, V, 1944, pp. 81 ff.

²¹ Steele inserted praise of The Fan in The Englishman in December, 1713, when we know that Gay was writing his Eclogues.—Letter from Pope to Swift, December 8, 1713, Pope, Correspondence, I, 200. Quoted by Irving, John Gay, p. 82.—In the same month, Steele published four poems by Gay in his Poetical Miscellanies—Imprint 1714, but published on Dec. 29, 1713, according to R. Blanchard, The Occasional Verse of Richard Steele, Oxford, 1952, p. xviii.—The Shepherd's Week was advertised in several issues of The Lover. Moreover, Gay's publisher was this time not Lintott, but Ferdinand Burleigh, who also published The Englishman and The Lover, a fact which may diminish the evidence of the advertisements, but which, on the other hand, may indicate that Steele helped Gay to find a publisher.—R. Blanchard, ed., Richard Steele's Periodical Journalism, Oxford, 1959, p. 271.

²² Letter from Gay to Addison [1716?], Addison, Letters, pp. 449-500.

²³ Gildon's attack on Gay concerns the triviality of the subject matter of The Fan. The Dedication of The Mohocks was intended not only to support Pope, but also to express Gay's own opinion about Dennis's preoccupation with the Sublime and the high Kinds. The What D'Ye Call It does not only ridicule Philips's and Addison's Tragedies, but rather the solemnity of Tragedy in general.—Cf. the contemporary Complete Key to the Last New Farce The What D 'Ye Call It, London, 1715, and Irving, John Gay, pp. 112-14.—The play, a Kind mixed beyond identification, has a social aim … with low characters "copied" after nature in contrast to the noble characters of Tragedy imitated after Nature. For the Preface, see pp. 47 and 187 ff.

²⁴ Gay described English flowers not only in The Shepherd's Week, but also and earlier in Panthea, a fact which takes away the point from the suggestion that these sort of descriptions parody similar elements in Philips's poems. Names like Lightfoot do not seem to have been very unusual in poetry of this kind. Abel Evans has Whitefoot in No. VIII of his Pastorals.—A Select Collection of Poems, ed. J. Nichols, 8 vols., London, 1780-84, V, 98. The poems are dated 1707, 1709, 1710, 1719 and 1726. Reference in Jones, "Eclogue Types in English Poetry", p. 50.—The so-called "inane exclamations" in Thursday (11. 5-6) may parody lines in Philips's Pastorals, but the common source may also be the Theocritean complaint, for instance, in Creech's translation, of which there was an edition in 1713.

Ah me! unhappy me! what pains I bear?
Ah me! undone! yet you refuse to hear.

The Idylliums of Theocritus, p. 23.—Finally the "pseudo-simplicity" passage in Monday (11. 103-10), which is supposed to support Pope's ridicule of similar lines in his rival's Sixth Pastoral, was added as late as 1720. By then the original controversy must have fallen into oblivion, but not the general principles which the poems of the two antagonists represented.—Both Philips's and Gay's passages, showing transgressions in the innocence of the characters and actually parallelling the Aristotelian tragic "flaw", again have a common source, a convention which probably originated in the bathing scene in Tasso's Aminta (III, i). Fontenelle's use of it in his Eclogue VIII had been criticized by Chetwood for offending against the French critic's own second rule that characters should be innocent.—"A Preface to the Pastorals", in Dryden, Works, XIII, 335.—It was thus enough in the limelight to be imitated by Philips, commended in the latter's version by The Guardian, No. 23, and later added by Gay.

²⁵ Cf. for instance, also W. H. Williams in the Introduction to Gay's Trivia, London, 1922, p. xiv, where Philips's poems are said to belong to the "conventional" type, the "artificiality" of which Gay "intended to ridicule", and Diaper's editor, who calls Pope and Philips "adherents to the formal pastoral eclogue".—Complete Works, p. xxviii.

²⁶ Congleton, op. cit., pp. 75 ff., in particular.

²⁷A Treatise de Carmine Pastorali. See Congleton, op. cit., pp. 53 ff.

²⁸ Quotations from Fontenelle, Of Pastorals, pp. 282, 284 and 279. See Congleton, op. cit., pp. 65 ff.

²⁹ Cf. Congleton, op. cit., pp. 70-71, and Introduction to Pope, Pastorals, in Poems, I, 16.

³⁰ Apart from the general idealization, cf. Rapin's classification of pastoral poetry, as "Epicks of an inferior rank".—A Treatise de Carmine Pastorali, p. 18.—Cf. also his Reflections, p. 71.

³¹ Nos. 22, 23, 28, 30, 32.—Congleton, op. cit., pp. 87 ff.—They are ascribed to Tickell by J. E. Butt, "Notes for a Bibliography of Thomas Tickell", Bodleian Quarterly Record, V, 1928, p. 302. Quoted by Sherburn, Alexander Pope, p. 118 n. 4, and Congleton, op. cit., p. 324 n. 46.—Cf. however, Trapp, Lectures on Poetry, p. 178; R. E. Tickell, Thomas Tickell, pp. 26-27; and Ellis, op. cit., p. 209 n. 39.—Cf. below p. 113 n. 3.

³² No. 22, the third paragraph, and No. 32, the second paragraph.

³³ This seems very much in the spirit of Steele.

³⁴ Cf. p. 62 supra.

³⁵ Cf. Spectator, No. 523, by Addison, warning poets not to celebrate the peace treaty with ancient fictions.

³⁶ Congleton, op. cit. pp. 200 and 180.

³⁷ Ellis, op. cit., pp. 203 ff.

³⁸ Loc. cit.; Cf. also Day, The Songs of Thomas D'Urfey, pp. 29 ff., and the same writer's Introduction to Wit and Mirth: or, Pills to Purge Melancholy.

³⁹ op. cit., p. 212.

⁴⁰OHEL, VII, 141.

⁴¹ Cf. below p. 206.

⁴² Cf. below pp. 180-81, 194 ff.

⁴³A Satyr on the Modern Translators (1685), in Literary Works, I, 19-24. Reference in the Introduction to Eloisa to Abelard, in Pope, Poems, II, 275 n. 2.

⁴⁴The Works of Mr. Robert Gould, 2 vols., London, 1709, I, 156.

⁴⁵Lectures on Poetry, pp. 179-80. Quoted by Congleton, op. cit., p. 111.

⁴⁶ Marion K. Bragg, The Formal Eclogue in Eighteenth Century England (University of Maine Studies, Second Series, No. 6), Orono, 1926, p. 57.

⁴⁷ The popular taste for pastoral song was shared by Steele, although the admixture of light raillery was really what appealed to him, as in his praise of Lady Winchilsea's Pastoral Dialogue, published in "a collection of the best pastorals that [had] hitherto appeared in England", Philips's and Pope's included. (This seems to speak against Steele's authorship of the Guardian essays, at least the one praising Philips).—Tatler, No. 10. Quoted by R. Blanchard, ed., The Occasional Verse of Richard Steele, p. xvi.—Pope's January and May was also in this volume VI of Poetical Miscellanies, London, 1709. The reference to it in The Guardian, No. 30, need therefore perhaps not necessarily have been intended to insult Pope, as is thought by D. A. Fineman, "The Motivation of Pope's Guardian 40", MLN, LXVII, 1952, pp. 24 ff.—Probably after the footnote to No. 10 in Chalmers's edition of The Tatler, Dr. Ellis in op. cit., p. 208, ascribes the Pastoral Dialogue to Mrs. Singer. But in vol. VI of Poetical Miscellanies, p. 225, the poem is said to be "By the Author of the Poem on the Spleen". Elizabeth Singer's Pastoral appeared in vol. V of the same Miscellany, 1704, pp. 378 ff., and is a mixed version of Idyll VIII, Ecl. III and Fontenelle's Ecl. VIII, plus, it seems, Mrs. Singer-Rowe's own additions.

⁴⁸ [Ned Ward,] "Of the Beaus Club", The Secret History of Clubs, London, 1709, p. 143.

⁴⁹ John Tipper, the almanac-maker, according to W. Graham, English Literary Periodicals, New York, 1930, p. 146.—On the copy in the Bodl. Lib., Hope Adds 1190, is added in ink "Thos Walden".

⁵⁰Roxb. Ballads, V, 127; Bagf Ballads, II, 496.

⁵¹ Cf. Gay's letter quoted below p. 194 n. 3; a letter to Mrs. Howard in Suffolk Letters, I, 12; and Spectator, No. 37, for instance.

⁵² It is typical that it was Rowe who in this respect criticized Ozell in his prefatory "Account of Boileau's Writings, and this Translation" prefixed to Boileau's Lutrin.

⁵³ Op. cit., p. 207.

⁵⁴ Prior, A Satyr on the Modern Translators. Quoted by Ellis, op. cit., p. 203. For Steele, see p. 204. Cf. also p. 212.

⁵⁴The Craftsman, No. 146, April 19, 1729. Cf. also The Guardian, No. 67.

⁵⁶ Cf. supra pp. 24-25.

⁵⁷ Pointed out by Congleton, op. cit., p. 86.

⁵⁸ In The Second Pastoral, in Poems, p. 15.

⁵⁹ Cf. also Poems, p. xxii.

⁶⁰ Dennis, A True Character of Mr. Pope, and His Writings (1716), in Critical Works, II, 104.

⁶¹ See Sherburn, Alexander Pope, p. 118.

⁶² Cf. supra pp. 50-51.

⁶³Ars Poetica, 11. 38-39.

⁶⁴ Parnell refuses to accept Dennis's Tragedies and "Philips' rustic strain" among the venerable books, Homer, Virgil, Tasso, with which he builds his "sacred alter".—Mentioned by Sherburn, Alexander Pope, p. 121, and both poems by Ellis, op. cit., pp. 206-7, though not with quite the same purpose as here.

⁶⁵ Cf. supra pp. 36-38.

⁶⁶ The ballad-singer in Saturday.

⁶⁷The Suffolk Papers, II, 59, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS 22626.

⁶⁸ Roger is generally a lusty ballad character, as for instance, in D'Urfey's Roger's Delight (1687-88), Roger's Renown, both in Roxb. Ballads, VII, 210 ff. and 236 ff., and Roger Twangdillo, in Wit and Mirth, II, 1707, 1712, pp. 225 ff.—Ralph seems to be less cheerful. Cf. The Winchester Wedding, in Roxb. Ballads, VII, 208. According to Chappell, op. cit., II, 495. this ballad appeared in D'Urfey's Several New Songs, 1648. It is also in The Dancing Master of 1686 and in Wit and Mirth, I, 1707, p. 22.—Cf. The Ballad of Tom and Will in Miscellany Poems, III, 1706, pp. 250 ff. about two similar characters.

⁶⁹ This may have been the circle of acquaintances that Martha Blount wished Mrs. Howard would persuade Gay to leave, because they "so ill deserve[d] his compay".—The Suffolk Papers, I, 9 v (not published).

⁷⁰ E. R. Wasserman, Elizabethan Poetry in the Eighteenth Century (Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, No. 32), Urbana, 1947, p. 144.

⁷¹ Loc. cit.

⁷²The Bagford Collection for the History of Printing, Nos. 243 and 231.

⁷³ Cf. Will. King, "The Publisher to the Reader" prefixed to The Art of Cookery (1708), for instance, or his Preface to Joan of Headington, Useful Miscellanies (1712), in Original Works, III, 41 ff. and 3 ff.—The latter Preface is mentioned by Professor Sutherland in his Introduction to The Dunciad, in Pope, Poems, V, xl.

⁷⁴ C. J. Rawson, "Some Unpublished Letters of Pope and Gay, and Some Manuscript Sources of Goldsmith's Life of Thomas Parnell", RES, New Series, X, 1959, pp. 380 ff.

⁷⁵ St. John, to whom the poems were dedicated, obviously approved of Gay's "sonnets" or "madrigals" and suggested that they should be printed

With preface meet and notes profound
(1. 83)

It seems that in the Prologue, Gay related things as they had happened. Queen Anne, for instance, was in reality dangerously ill about Christmas 1713, and the Court ladies are mentioned by name. It is not unlikely that Arbuthnot and Bolingbroke had something to do with the swain's "hying" to court.

⁷⁶ LI. 87-88; Fontenelle, Of Pastorals, p. 278.

⁷⁷The Idylliums of Theocritus, p. 6.

⁷⁸ Cf. supra p. 118.

⁷⁹ Cf. Trapp, Lectures on Poetry, p. 186, and later Aikin, who disapproved of the "mixed pastoral". Congleton, op. cit., p. 136.

⁸⁰ "Dedication of the Pastorals", in Works, XIII, 323.

⁸¹P. L., IX, 445-51. Monday, 1.71, "in a gamesone mood" echoes P. L., VI, 620.

⁸² For Swift on the "neoclassic" side, see Congleton, op. cit., p. 84.—Swift, however, repeatedly demonstrated his aversion to conventions, as in Apollo's Edict (unless this poem only refers to Tickell), the Town Eclogue, the "unprintable" poems. He did not write either much imitative poetry or conventional pastoral poems. As for the hint to Gay to write Quaker and Newgate Pastorals (Congleton, loc. cit.), that was certainly suggested by Fontenelle's Of Pastorals.

⁸³ Although not yet published, Pope's "Discourse" was written at an early date (Pope, Poems, I, 13), and Gay may have seen it. Besides, the discussion about pastoral poetry was certainly not only carried on in writing.

⁸⁴Guardian, No. 40 (names), Nos. 40 and perhaps 30, and Pope's "Discourse", for various aspects of pastoral decorum.

⁸⁵ Theocritus's Doric was accepted by all critics. Spenser's dialect was approved of by the "rationalistic" but not the "neoclassic" school.

⁸⁶ Fable X, vi.

⁸⁷ LI. 56 and 136. Cf. Pope's later commentary to Summer, in Poems, I, 78.

⁸⁸ LI. 151–53.

⁸⁹Timber, or Discoveries, in Ben Jons on, VIII, 618.—There is also in this passage of Gay's an echo from "modern" Fontenelle's Dialogues of the Dead. In the Dedication, Fontenelle addresses Lucian and maintains that he works with his own materials on Lucian's "Ground-plat" or "Plan".—New Dialogues of the Dead, trans. J. D[ryden], London, 1683, A2, and Fontenelle's Dialogues of the Dead, trans. J. H[ughes], p. xlvi—Gay, of course, says that he works with old material.

⁹⁰ Cf. Jones, The Triumph of the English Language, pp. 117 and 211.

⁹¹ Cf. below pp. 131 ff., 142-43.

⁹² The notions of the Golden Age and "Arcadie" were much in the limelight not only through the Guardian essays, Nos. 22, 32 and 40, but also through a Rapin-inspired article in The Rhapsody, No. 6, Jan. 15, 1712, and the French critic's own Discourse, which was prefixed to Curll's much advertised new edition of Theocritus's Idylls, published in February, 1713.

⁹³Spectator, No. 523, about peace poems.

⁹⁴ Addison acquired "a very great distaste of the Golden Age" through his experiences of rustic lodgings during his Grand Tour.—Letters, p. 36.

⁹⁵A Reflection on Our Modern Poesy.—Savages are said to have left their caves in order to seek "fitter Dwellings".—Cf. supra p. 39 n. 3.

⁹⁶Poetical Works, pp. 184, 328, 368.

⁹⁷ J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress, London, 1924, pp. 218-19.

⁹⁸ See Jones, Ancients and Moderns, in particular pp. 191 ff.

⁹⁹ For June, 1707, pp. 127 ff.

¹⁰⁰Advice to an Author (1710), in Characteristics, I, 141-42, 145.

¹⁰¹ Nos. 30 and 32. Cf. supra pp. 111-12.

¹⁰² Cf. also The Third Pastoral, a funeral Elegy on the death of the young Duke of Gloucester and directed to the Queen.—According to the Bodl. Lib. catalogue, The Pastorals were published in four different editions in 1710, the year of crisis for the Whigs, perhaps as yet another reminder of the peacefulness of the British Isles in spite of the Whig war.

¹⁰³ The theme of pressing is met with in several ballads, some dating from the wars of William of Orange, such as The Young Women and Maidens' Lamentation, in Roxb. Ballads, VII, 117, others published in Wit and Mirth, for instance, IV, 1709, 1712, pp. 102, 117, 134.—In The What D'Ye Call It, Gay made use of the same theme.

¹⁰⁴ The white staff of the Lord Treasurer.

¹⁰⁵ The Queen is praised as the "Compassionate and tender Mother", who by the Peace has "establish'd her own Glory and the Welfare of her People".

¹⁰⁶ Bolingbroke, Fragments, or Minutes of Essays, in Works, VIII, 165. Bolingbroke refers to "our friend Gay's Fly, in his Fables" as an example of "the principle of continuity".

¹⁰⁷Works, IV, 162.

¹⁰⁸ Myra Reynolds, The Treatment of Nature in Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, Chicago, 1896, p. 6.

¹⁰⁹ Bolingbroke, Letters, or Essays, Addressed to Alexander Pope, Esq., in Works, V, 83.

¹¹⁰Guardian, No. 22.

¹¹¹ Quotation from Rapin, A Tratise de Carmine Pastorali, p. 28.

¹¹²Of Pastorals, p. 282.

¹¹³The Art of Sinking in Poetry, p. 62.

¹¹⁴ LI. 7-12.

¹¹⁵ Letter to Pope, April 1, 1717, Pope, Correspondence, I, 398. Quoted by Kerlin, op. cit., p. 61.

¹¹⁶ Bentley's Q. Horatius Flaccus Ex Recensione & cum Notis atque Emendationibus, Cambridge 1711, 310 pages of text and 410 pages of notes and index, was ridiculed in "Notes upon Notes" in The Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Seculare of Horace, in Latin and English; with a Translation of Dr Ben-ley's Notes, London, 1712-13.—Mohocks are mentioned in Part V, for instance.

¹¹⁷ Supposedly imitating Theocritus's Doric. Cf. p. 143, n. 1, below.

¹¹⁸ For instance, Edw. Phillips, The New World of Words, 6th ed. J[ohn] K[ersey], London, 1706.

¹¹⁹ Preface to J. Kersey, Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, London, 1708.

¹²⁰ Jones, "Eclogue Types in English Poetry", p. 49 n. 23; Bragg, p. cit., p. 56.

¹²¹ Cf. below pp. 148-52.

¹²² As Gay did not indicate the sources otherwise than as "Virgil" and "Theocritus", the numbers and lines are supplied here, together with some more echoes, in particular a group from the Idylls,

Monday, 23 ff. 83-94, 117-18, 120

Wednesday, 5-8, 9-18, 18, 25, 37, 59-62, 67-72

Thursday, 64, 127, 66, 93, 109, 123, 131

Friday, 15, 84, 90, 93, 153

Saturday, 22, 40, 43, 47, 51 ff., 97, 112, 117

Monday, 49-56, 59-70, 72

Geo., I, 375 ff.

Ecl., VII, 61-64; 11, 106-7, 109

Ecl., VIII, 2-4, 6-7, 12-13, 16, 26, 27, 28

Id., II, 23-24, 58

Ecl., VIII, 83, 102, 77-78, 95-96, 107

Ecl., V, 10-11, 38-39, 42, 45-47 and 50-51, 76-78

Ecl., VI, 16, 22, 25-26, 29-30, 31 ff., 45-46, 74

Id., XI, 20; XII, 3-8; VIII, 41-48, 72-73

Tuesday, 41-44, 15-18, 73-78

Wednesday, 49-50

Thursday, 127-28

Saturday, 7-12

Id., II, 88-89; X, 1-6; III, 31-33

Id., VI, 34-38

Id., II, 48-49

Id., X, 51

¹²³ Will. King, Dialogues of the Dead, IX, in Original Works, I, 171.—Cf. p. 32 supra.

¹²⁴ Kerby-Miller, op. cit., p. 111.

¹²⁵ Cf. supra pp. 109–10 n. 5.

¹²⁶An Essay Concerning the Nature of Aliments and the Choice of Them According to the Different Constitutions of Human Bodies, London, 1731, pp. 71-72.

¹²⁷ Ibid., p. 53. Cf. also Kerby-Miller, op. cit., pp. 106 and 210–11.

¹²⁸ This Opera, called by Gay in his footnote the World in the Sun, was probably a source of inspiration for The Beggar's Opera. In the "World of the Sun", a courtier is considered low, but a "Cut-purse" is an ingenious person, who is entitled to a pension when attacked by palsy in his hands. The mildest person, not a tyrant as on the earth, is chosen King in the "Kingdom of Birds".

¹²⁹The Transactioneer, II, in Original Works, II, 37.

¹³⁰ Kerby-Miller, op. cit., p. 106.

¹³¹God Speed the Plough (c. 1665), in Roxb. Ballads, VI, 521.

¹³²Ec. VII, 11. 84–90, in Poems, II, 900-01.

¹³³ Cf. Ellis, op. cit., pp. 209 and 210, where Gay's echo of the ballad in The Guardian, No. 40, is pointed out, but not its "modernity". That Steele with his low taste was led to accept Pope's praise of it as genuine, is perhaps less surprising if we remember that by the time of the fourth edition of Miscellany Poems (1716), verse like The West-Country Bachelor's Complaint, not unlike the "ancient ballad" that Pope quoted as a ludicrous example, had become respectable enough to be published in that anthology. For other ballads in the same Miscellany, see Friedman, op. cit., p. 130.

¹³⁴ Preface to Bentley, A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, London, 1699.—Cf. also King, Dialogues of the Dead, I, and The Transactioneer, I, in Original Works, I, 147, and II, 41-42.

¹³⁵Of Pastorals, p. 293.

¹³⁶ Rapin in fact also considered proverbs "fit for a Shepherd's mouth"—A Treatise de Carmine Pastorali, pp. 67-68.

¹³⁷ For Sir William Temple in this respect, see Hustvedt, op. cit., p. 48.—An extract from Hervarer Saga was published in its original form and with an English translation in vol. VI of Miscellany Poems, 1716, pp. 387 ff.—William King quoted from the Swedish scholar Scheferus, from whom the interest in Lapland songs must have spread.—Remains of… William King, p. 51.—Lapponia was published in Latin in 1673 and in English in 1674.—Curiously enough, the volume about Sweden and Lapland, among other countries, by the Frenchman De la Mottraye was illustrated with engravings by Hogarth, the realist, who hardly left London. But perhaps no more surprising than that William Kent illustrated The Faerie Queene.—A. de la Mottraye, Voyages and Travels, 3 vols., London, 1723, II, No. XXXVIII. Cf. Antal, op. cit., p. 85.

¹³⁸ Kerby-Miller, op. cit., pp. 109 ff., and for King, pp. 221-22.—Gay's lines on hot-cockles in Monday are quoted p. 226 without further comment.

¹³⁹ Ibid, pp. 221-22. It is No. V of Useful Transactions, in Original Works, II, 83. For the Playford letters as one of the sources for Ch. V of the Memoirs and for the theory of authorship, see Kerby-Miller, op. cit., p. 222.

¹⁴⁰ The reference is to Kennet's Parochial Antiquities, London, 1695, pp. 610 and 614.

¹⁴¹ Guarini, 11 Pastor Fido, II, v, 2.

¹⁴² 2nd 3d., London, 1691, p. 143.

¹⁴³ There may be an allusion to Walpole from Norfolk, who had been impeached in 1712 and had many a ballad written on him, even supposed, like Lilliburlero James II, to have sung him out of office.—Preface to A Pill to Purge State-Melancholy.—A dumpling is thrown against the monster of war in Yarhell's Kitchen, London, 1713, and seems in the satire of the period to be an emblem of the English. Cf. also A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling, London, 1726. For the authorship, see G. A. Aitken, The Life and Works of John Arbuthnot, Oxford, 1892, p. 111. In the CBEL the pamphlet is ascribed to Henry Carey.

¹⁴⁴ "Cowell's Interpreter", which is the source indicated, is A Law Dictionary: or, the Interpreter of Words and Terms Used either in the Common or Statute Laws, etc. First Published by the Learned Dr. Cowel. … London, 1708.—Gay probably found it in his friend William Fortescue's chambers.

¹⁴⁵Original Works, I, 200.

¹⁴⁶ Ibid., I, 187.

¹⁴⁷ The English "modernness" of the charming "nosegays" in the comparisons in Monday was probably also suggested by King's Dialogues of the Dead and A Journey to London, where English rosemary is held up against gaudy French tulips, carnations and jonquils.—Original Works, I, 172 and 203.—"Sprigg'd rosemary" could be naturally introduced by Gay into his funeral Elegy, "rosemary … for remembrance". For Gay's awareness of the gradation of flowers, cf. his treatment of the poetical rose in Fable I, xlv.

¹⁴⁸ Cf. below pp. 143 ff.

¹⁴⁹Of Pastorals, pp. 286-87.

¹⁵⁰ "Preface to the Pastorals", in Dryden, Works, XIII, 334.

¹⁵¹The Philosophical Transactions, London and Oxford, 1665 et seq., XXVI, 123.

¹⁵² No. III, in Original Works, II, 114-15, but with the wrong number.

¹⁵³ Letter, No. 167 (1685), XV, 841 ff.

¹⁵⁴The Transactioneer, II, in Original Works, II, 42.— King's reference is to No. 240 (1698), XX, 167 ff., a report from New England about glowworms and other insects and birds.

¹⁵⁵ This is also in the spirit of King, whose Gentleman answered the Virtuoso's zeal for Jamaica pepper by saying that every "kitchen-girl about the town" was familiar with that spice.—The Transactioneer, I, in Original Works, II, 10.—The reference is to No. 192 of The Philosophical Transactions.

¹⁵⁶ J. R. Moore, "Gay's Burlesque of Sir Richard Blackmore's Poetry", JEGP, L, 1951, pp. 83-89.

¹⁵⁷Poems, II, 895 ff.

¹⁵⁸Complete Works, pp. 34-36, 304-5.

¹⁵⁹ L. 50.

¹⁶⁰ Lucretius, II, 67 ff. Cf. Pope's Essay on Man, III, 15 n., in Poems, III, i, 93. Cf. also Arbuthnot, An Essay Concerning … Aliments, p. 23, "All Animals are made, immediately or mediately of Vegetables, that is by feeding on Vegetables, or in Animals that are fed on Vegetables, there being no Process in infinitum."—Cf. also Bolingbroke, Works, VIII, 231.

¹⁶¹ King provided the model for "modern" subject matter. His Journey to London has an Index similar to Gay's Catalogue.—The Catalogue is called a "mark of Scriblerus" by C. F. Burgess, who does, however, not indicate its real character.—'Scriblerian Influence in "The Shepherd's Week" ', N&Q, CCVIII, 1963, p. 218.

¹⁶² Emma F. Pope, "Renaissance Criticism and the Diction of The Faerie Queene", PMLA, XLI, 1926, pp. 575 ff., in particular, p. 588.

¹⁶³ Kerby-Miller, op. cit., p. 119.

¹⁶⁴ In Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany Poems (1708), according to Miss Segar in her Introduction to The Poems of Ambrose Philips, p. xix.

¹⁶⁵ Cf. Philips's use of the verb "endite" in The Second Pastoral.

¹⁶⁶ Cf. supra pp. 25 and 39-40. Chevy Chase had already been printed in Miscellany Poems, 1702, according to Hustvedt, op. cit., p. 60.

¹⁶⁷ Bagford and Wanley, for instance. See supra p. 65.

¹⁶⁸ For the importance of The Works of the Learned for the Scriblerians, see Kerby-Miller, op. cit., pp. 14-15.

¹⁶⁹W. Wagstaffe, A Comment upon the History of Tom Thumb, London, 1711.—Mentioned in Hustvedt, op. cit., p. 73.—"Woodwardius" is, of course, the supposed model for Dr. Fossile in the Jonsonian Comedy, Three Hours after Marriage, by Gay mainly, Pope and Arbuthnot, ed. R. Morton and W. M. Peterson (Lake Erie College Studies, No. 1), Painsville, 1961, and ed. J. Harrington Smith (Augustan Reprint Society Publications, No. 91-92), Los Angeles, 1961.

¹⁷⁰ Cf supra p. 133.

¹⁷¹Of Pastorals, pp. 286-87.

¹⁷² One of them, The Children in the Wood (Wit and Mirth, II, 1707, 1712, p. 116), was imitated in a "modern" version about "Audenard", in Wit and Mirth, IV, 1709, p. 328. King made Orpheus play it in Orpheus and Eurydice (1704). Cf. also The Guardian, No. 41. Gay echoed the first line in Polly's song, "Air XII", in The Beggar's Opera.

¹⁷² Addison's Rosamond appeared in its 3rd edition in 1713.

¹⁷³Wit and Mirth, III, 1707, 1712, p. 82.—Part of Gay's almost literal borrowing (11. 103-08) from the ballad is one of the "thoughts" that Addison praised in The Spectator, No. 74, and part echoes King's satire of the pedant in A Journey to London, the dissertation on the "old stone of Scotland" with the old pindaric where words like "stumps" were printed in "black letters". One recognizes the discussion on the style of ballads.—"Witherington" still seems to be remembered by English people as the man who "fought upon his stumps".

¹⁷⁴Wit and Mirth: An Antidote against Melancholy, London, 1682, p. 14. Later editions seem to have dropped it in favour of another song on a similar Quaker theme.—Ellis, op. cit., p. 211, refers for these and the following ballads to the numbers of items in Day and Murrie, English Song-Books. Where possible, the references in this volume are to the early editions of Wit and Mirth.

¹⁷⁵A True Relation of the Dreadful Combat between More of More-Hall and the Dragon of Wantley, in Wit and Mirth, I, 1707, 1712, p. 1. Cf. also Roxb. Ballads, VIII, 415.

¹⁷⁶Cousin Taffy, in Wit and Mirth, III, 1707, 1712, p. 188, or Of Noble Race was Shinking, in Wit and Mirth, I, 1707, p. 311, and "Air XXXI" in The Beggar's Opera.

¹⁷⁷ See De Sola Pinto and Rodway, op. cit., p. 71;Bagf Ballads, II, 370; and Chappell, op. cit., II, 568. It is "Air XLIV" in The Beggar's Opera. Cf. also Roxb. Ballads, IX, 792.—For "Sawney", see below p. 148 n. 4.

¹⁷⁸ Kidson, op. cit., p. 74.

¹⁷⁹A Warning for Maidens; or, Young Bateman, in Roxb. Ballads, III, 194 and Chappell, op. cit., I, 196.—As an example of "the Miraculous" and in order not to disappoint female readers, "who, like the Justice in the What d'ye Call it, doubtless expect in such a Collection a Competency of Ghosts", Ambrose Philips includes it in his vol. I, 261.

¹⁸⁰ Probably The Woeful Lamentation of Jane Shore, a Goldsmith's Wife in London, Sometime King Edward the Fourth's Concubine, in A Collection of Old Ballads, I, 147.—Rowe's Tragedy Jane Shore was published in the beginning of the year 1714.—A New Ballad of King Edward and Jane Shore is a burlesque, in Wit and Mirth, III, 1707, 1712, p. 20. Cf. Roxb. Ballads, VIII, 421.

¹⁸¹Fair Rosamund by Th. Deloney, in Roxb. Ballads, V, 667 and Wit and Mirth, V, 1714. A Collection of Old Ballads has two versions, I, I and I, 11.—The "bow'r" is made much of in both the ballad and the Opera.

¹⁸² For the numerous ballads about this hero and literary references, see Chappell, op. cit., II, 387, and Roxb. Ballads, II, 419-49 and IX, 481-539.—A Collection of Old Ballads contains eleven ballads about Robin Hood.

¹⁸³An Excellent Ballad, Intituled, The Wandering Prince of Troy, the first stanza of which ends "and Corn now grows where Troy Town stood".—Wit and Mirth, III, 1707, 1712, p. 15. For the story of the ballad, see Roxb. Ballads, VI, 547, where it is called The Wandering Prince of Troy; or Queen Dido. It is "Air XLV" in Polly.

¹⁸⁴New Dialogues of the Dead, p. 21, and Dialogues of the Dead, p. 13.—For a survey of Renaissance and neo-classical criticism of Homer, see E. N. Tigerstedt, Engelsk nyhumanism och nyklassicism under 1700-talet (Humanistisk Kultur, No. 7), Stockholm, 1963, Ch. 1.

¹⁸⁵ January, 1708.

¹⁸⁶Guardian, No. 67.

¹⁸⁷The Evening Post for February 10-12 and 21-24, 1713.

¹⁸⁸ Mentioned by Ellis, op. cit., p. 204.

¹⁸⁹ This Preface anticipated or was even the model for those to A Collection of Old Ballads. But the editor, Ambrose Philips, was at least half serious, in spite of what he assured his readers in the Preface to the third volume.

¹⁹⁰ Cf. Roxb. Ballads, I, 331, 337, 564, 611; II, 345; IV, 409; VII, 24.

¹⁹¹Wednesday, 1. 8; Thursday, 1. 73; Friday, 1. 75; Saturday, 1. 28.

¹⁹²The Squabble for the singing-contest seems to echo the chorus in The Queen's Health; or, New Gillian of Croydon, "Then hey for the Squabble in Spain".—Wit and Mirth, 1719, I, 146. The tune is "Mall Peatley", a country dance, and the same that Gay used for "Air XVIII" in Achilles. Gillian of Croydon—to William III—is in Wit and Mirth, II, 1707 and 1712, and is not an alteration of the former, as was thought by Chappell, op. cit., I, 289 and II, 778, but rather vice versa.

¹⁹² Cf below pp. 151 ff., 200. ff.

¹⁹⁴The Countrey-Farmer; or, The Buxome Virgin (Roxb. Ballads, III, 363) was sung to "a New Tune, called New-Market", which Chappell (op. cit., II, 562) thinks is D'Urfey's "To Horse, Brave Boys", one of the songs mentioned in Wednesday.

¹⁹⁵ In The Virtuous Wife (1680) and Wit and Mirth, I, 1707, p. 133. It is "Air XXX" in Polly.— This song begins "Sawney was tall and of noble Race". There are two other "Sawneys", one in Wit and Mirth, II, 1707, 1712, p. 242, and one in I, 1707, p. 237, the latter by Motteux, according to Chappell, op. cit., II, 612.

¹⁹⁶ J. Cooper's translation in Ovid's Epistles (1712), p. 90.

¹⁹⁷ Radcliffe, Ovid Travestie, pp. 70-71.

¹⁹⁸ Diaper, Nereides, I, 13-16. The editor quotes this passage in comparison with Gay's, but without mentioning the common source. Op. cit., p. xxxix.

¹⁹⁹ These lines and a similar passage in Leander to Hero, Ovid's Epistles, pp. 71-72, and also Tatler, No. 82, seem to have provided ingredients for the ballad in The What D'Ye Call It.

²⁰⁰ Op. cit., pp. 38-39.

²⁰¹ Cf. this couplet with Id. XXIII, 11. 50 ff.

²⁰² Cf. "quench" in the quotation from Phillis to Demophon, 1. 3 from the bottom.

²⁰³ Cf. the ending of The Rape of the Lock.

²⁰⁴Eclogue III, in The Bucolicks of Baptist Mantuan, tr. Th. Harvey, London, 1656, p. 24.

²⁰⁵ The following line echoes Browne's Britannia's Pastorals, II, v.—

The glasse of Time had well-nye spent the sand
It had to run.

²⁰⁶ There is some warrant for this realistic ending in Ecl. II, 1. 73.—Cf. Ned Ward's description of rustic "noisy Revels" at wakes, where swains and "tann'd Trulls" dance round Maypoles and then repair to the ale-house orchard for "March-Beer", apple-pie and cheese.—Nuptial Dialogues and Debates, 2 vols., London, 1710, I, 144.

²⁰⁷ Cf. supra pp. 125 ff., 140-41, 143 ff.

²⁰⁸ Cf. for instance, J. S., The Shepherd's Kalender: or. The Citizen's and Country Man's Daily Companion, London, n.d., in the Bodl. Lib. catalogue dated c. 1715.

²⁰⁹Pastorals. Mentioned by Tucker Brooke as anticipating Gay, in A. C. Baugh, ed., A Literary History of England, New York, 1948, p. 503.

²¹⁰A Week's Loving, Wooing and Wedding, in Roxb. Ballads, VII, 136.—Cf. also D'Urfey's poem Collin's Walk through London and Westminster (1690).

²¹¹ From Rosalinda and Blouzabella, the latter in D'Urfey's Italian Song Call'd Pastorella; made into an English Dialogue, in Wit and Mirth, III, 1707 and 1712, p. 309.

²¹² The first line of Collin's song in that Opera was echoed by Gay in his ballad in The What D 'Ye Call It.

'Twas when the Sheep were shearing.

²¹³Mother Bunch's Closet Newly Broke Open, 2 pts., ed. G. L. Gomme, London, 1885, I, 18.—The editor says in the Introduction that Part I is dated 1685.

²¹⁴ Ibid., II, 29.

²¹⁵ L. C. Wimberley, Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads, Chicago, 1928, pp. 362-63.

²¹⁶ The trick in Thursday, 11. 15-24, is described in an edition in the Bodl. Lib. (Douce p. 164) of Mother Bunch's Closet Newly Broke Open, n.d. and n. p., I, 24. See also II, 14 and 15.

²¹⁷ There are advertisements about "Golden Pills", the "Golden Unction" and other universal remedies, even for love-sickness, in the Bagford Collection for the History of Printing, Nos. 92, 228, 243. Cf. also advertisements about fortune-tellers and many a "Student in Astrology". Those dated are from the early 18th century.

²¹⁸ Th. Campion, Songs from Lute Books, in The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse, pp. 841-42; Volpone, IV, i; Othello, III, iv; The Sad Shepherd, II, iii; The Gipsies Metamorphos'd; Th. Middleton and W. Rowley, The Spanish Gipsie; and later, Prior's version of Henry and Emma.—Cf. below p. 187.

²¹⁹ No. 130. Cf. also rules for palmistry in J. S., The True Fortune-Teller, London, 1686.

²²⁰ L. 80 echoes The Gipsies Metamorphos 'd, 11. 248-49.

²²¹ Addison in The Spectator, No. 523, obviously criticizes Pope's "theology".

²²² Gummere, op. cit., pp. 117 ff.

²²³ The first line of the burthen in Thursday echoes A&C, V, ii, 307.

²²⁴Palinode. Cf. 11. 69-80 in Panthea.

²²⁵Hos ego versiculos and Sic Vita, in The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, ed. H. J. C. Grierson and G. Bullough, Oxford, 1951, pp. 339 ff. and 359. Cf. also pp. 183 ff.

²²⁶The Cruel Mother and Clerk Colvill, for instance. Quoted by Wimberley, op. cit., pp. 254 and 286.

²²⁷The Song of Philander in two song-books from the 1680's, according to Chappell, op. cit., I, 279 ff., and in Wit and Mirth, II, 1707, p. 252.

²²⁸ Hodgart, op. cit., p. 32.

²²⁹ The hare bequeathes her body to her tormentors.—Roxb. Ballads, VII, 87.—A young man gives "toil and travel" to poor folk and "Hearts of Flint" to rich men.—Wit and Mirth, IV, 1709, p. 34.—There is a translation of one in The Muses Mercury for October, 1707.

²³⁰Roxb. Ballads, I, 186 ff.

²³¹ Cf. this line and also 1. 95 in Tuesday with the famous letters from Stanton Harcourt in August, 1718. See Sutherland, op. cit., p. 74.

²³² Echoes The Bride's Buriall, "And like a Lamb departed Life."—The quotation is from Philips's Collection, I, 234. For the authorship of the Collection, see Friedman, op. cit., p. 147 n. 72.

²³³ Cf. Wit and Mirth, I, 1707, pp. 125, 249; II and III, 1707, 1712, pp. 180 and 25; Have among You! Good Women, in Roxb. Ballads, I, 435, and Cucking a Scold, in The Pepys Ballads, ed. H. E. Rollins, 8 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1929, I, 454.—One of the Roxburghe ballads (IV, 355) is illustrated with a woodcut representing a "stool".

²³⁴Wit and Mirth, I, 1707, 1712, p. 254; II, 1707, p. 171; IV, 1709, pp. 86 and 89; Roxb. Ballads, VIII, 235; The Diverting Post, No. 14, 1705.

²³⁵Wit and Mirth, II, 1707, 1712, p. 148, beginning "All in a misty Morning" and "Air XXX" in The Beggar's Opera.

²³⁶Wit and Mirth, I, 1707, pp. 293 and 327.

²³⁷Wit and Mirth, I, 1707, p. 220.

²³⁸ Ellis, op. cit., p. 212.

²³⁹ VII, 43–45.—Cf. also Roxb. Ballads, IV, 385 and VII, 279.—The Northern Ditty was printed in Wit and Mirth, II, 1707, 1712, p. 163, and is "Air III" in The Beggar's Opera.

²⁴⁰ For "wash sorrow from thy soul", see p. 162 n. 1; "o'er hills and far away", "Air XVI" in The Beggar's Opera, in Wit and Mirth, IV, 1709, pp. 99 and 102, and in Roxb. Ballads, V, 316 ff. For "Gillian of Croydon", see p. 148 n. 1. Patient Grissel was one of the best known "Fables … Modern" and appeared both as play, Tale and ballad. Mentioned among the popular entertainments in, for instance, An Ancient Song of Bartholomew-Fair, in Wit and Mirth, II, 1707, p. 171.

²⁴¹ Ellis, op. cit., p. 211.

²⁴² Dobree, OHEL, VII, 141.

²⁴³ Cf. supra p. 112.

²⁴⁴ Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Works, ed. A. Glover and A. R. Waller, 10 vols., Cambridge, 1905-12, II, 406.

²⁴⁵The Overburian Characters (Percy Reprints, No. 13), ed. W. J. Paylor, Oxford, 1936, p. 56.

²⁴⁶ Marlowe, Hero and Leander, I, 22, in Poems, ed. L. C. Martin and in Works and Life, ed. R. H. Case, 6 vols., London, 1930-33, IV, 29.

²⁴⁷Life and Complete Works, ed. A. B. Grosart, 15 vols., London, 1881-86, VI, 141.

²⁴⁸ L. 12.

²⁴⁹ Greene and Lodge, A Looking Glass for London and England, I, iii, 356-60, in Greene, Plays and Poems, ed. J. C. Collins, 2 vols., Oxford, 1905, I, 155.

²⁵⁰The Sad Shepherd, I, iv, 48-50; Barclay, Eclogue I, 11. 323-27; Browne, Britannia's Pastorals, I; The theme is in the Geo., II, 527 ff.

²⁵¹ LI. 1302 and 1364.

²⁵² Reference in G. Kitchen, A Survey of Burlesque and Parody in English, Edinburgh and London, 1931, p. 72 n. 1.

²⁵³ Spenser, Daphnaida; Marlowe, Dido, V, i, 133; Ph. Fletcher, Piscatory Eclogues, III, 4; Drummond, Phyllis, on the Death of Her Sparrow; Crashaw, To Pontius, also Prior, A Better Answer.

²⁵⁴LLL, IV, iii, 8; Ecl. VIII; Id. III.

²⁵⁵MND, III i, 173; Pericles, II, iii, 43; The Duchess of Malfi, IV, ii; The Sad Shepherd, II, viii, 57; Greene, Doron's Eclogue; Marvell, The Mower to the Glow-Worms; Carew, To … Sandys.

²⁵⁶ Cf. Ellis, op. cit., p. 211.—Wit and Mirth, I, 1707, pp. 22 and 252; II, 1707, 1712, pp. 145, 210; Chappell, op. cit., I, 312 n. 1, hardly gives the adequate explanation of the expression.

²⁵⁷George-a-Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, II, iii, 374; The Sad Shepherd, I, iv. 51; The Shepherd's Pipe, III, 54; Corinna's Going a-Maying.—Cf. also Spectator, No. 365.

²⁵⁸MWW, II, i.—It is not a gibe at Blackmore, as is thought by J. R. Moore, op. cit., pp. 86 ff.

²⁵⁹ Playford, The Musical Companion, London, 1673, p. 9; Brome, Songs and Other Poems, p. 138; The Muses Mercury for June and December, 1707; Chappell, op. cit., II, 689 and 777, says there are several versions of the song he reprints.—Gay's song in The Mohocks echoes a drinking-song in Wit and Mirth, I, 1707, p. 204; "Air XIX" in The Beggar's Opera is also a drinking-song.

²⁶⁰Th. Tusser 1557 Floruit His Good Points of Husbandry, ed. D. Hartley, London, 1931, pp. 169-70.

²⁶¹ Cf. the "Dissection of a Beau's HEAD and of a Coquette's HEART" in No. 275 of The Spectator.

²⁶² Cf. below pp. 183 ff.

²⁶³ Cf below p. 206.

²⁶⁴Saturday, 11. 23-28. Even Blouzelinda may represent a realistic shepherdess, if one may judge from a letter to Gay from Pope, 23 Sept., 1714, Correspondence, I, 255.

²⁶⁵ For two of the lesser Epistles, see Armens, John Gay, pp. 106 ff. and 114 ff.; and for a more detailed treatment of four of the longer ones, with consideration of the aspect of the "lower order", see Adina Forsgren, "Some Complimentary Epistles by John Gay", Studia Neophilologica, XXXVI, 1, 1964.

²⁶⁶ For the history of lace-making, see J. R. W. Coxhead, The Romance of the Wool, Lace and Pottery Trade in Honiton, 1957, Cf. Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England, 2 vols., London, 1811, I, 272, where, under the heading of "Manufactures" for Devon, "Bone-lace" is the only item.