Excerpt from Gay's Fables and Other Poems; Cotton's Visions in Verse; Moore's Fables for the Female Sex: With Sketches of the Authors Lives Next year he published The Shepherd's Week, ' six English pastorals, in which the images are drawn from real life, such as it appears among the rustics in parts of England remote from London. Steele, in some parts of The Guardian, ' had praised Ambrose Philips, as the pastoral writer 'that yielded only to Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser. Pope, who had also published pastorals, not pleased to be overlooked, drew up a com parison of his own compositions with those of Philips, in which he covertly gave himself the preference, while he seemed to disown it. Not content with this, he is supposed to have incited Gay to write The Shep herd's Week to shew, that if it be necessary to copy nature with minuteness, rural life must be exhibited such as grossness and ignorance have made it. SO far the plan was reasonable: but the pastorals are intro deced by a proeme, written with such imitation as they could Obtain of obsolete language, and by consequence in a style that was never spoken nor written in any age or in any place. But the effect of reality and truth became conspicu ous, even when the intention was to shew them gro vellin g and degraded. These pastorals became popular, and were read with delight, as just representations of rural manners and occupations, by those who had no interest in the rivalry of the poets, nor knowledge of the critical dispute. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.