118 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

with other literature, to the porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses on a chimney-piece as compared with great works of sculpture.

90. Of course all good poetry, descriptive of rural life, is essentially pastoral, or has the effect of the pastoral on the minds of men living in cities; but the class of poetry which I mean, and which you probably understand by the term pastoral, is that in which a farmer’s girl is spoken of as a “nymph,” and a farmer’s boy as a “swain,” and in which, throughout, a ridiculous and unnatural refinement is supposed to exist in rural life, merely because the poet himself has neither had the courage to endure its hardships, nor the wit to conceive its realities. If you examine the literature of the 17th and 18th centuries you will find that nearly all its expressions, having reference to the country, show something of this kind; either a foolish sentimentality, or a morbid fear, both of course coupled with the most curious ignorance. You will find all its descriptive expressions at once vague and monotonous. Brooks are always “purling”; birds always “warbling”; mountains always “lift their horrid peaks above the clouds”; vales always “are lost in the shadow of gloomy woods”; a few more distinct ideas about haymaking and curds and cream, acquired in the neighbourhood of Richmond Bridge, serving to give an occasional appearance of freshness to the catalogue of the sublime and beautiful which descended from poet to poet; while a few true pieces of pastoral, like the Vicar of Wakefield, and Walton’s Angler, relieved the general waste of dulness. Even in these better productions, nothing is more remarkable than the general conception of the country merely as a series of green fields, and the combined ignorance and dread of more sublime scenery; of which the mysteries and dangers were enhanced by the difficulties of travelling at the period. Thus in Walton’s Angler, you have a meeting of two friends, one a Derbyshire man, the other a lowland traveller, who is as much alarmed, and uses nearly as many expressions of astonishment, at having

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