Other Poet travelling in this plain highway of Pastoral I know none." Presently comes an attack but little disguised on Philips: "Thou will not find my shepherdesses idly piping on oaten reeds, but milking the kine, tying up the sheaves, or if the hogs are astray driving them to their styes.

My shepherd gathereth none other nosegays but what are the growth of our own fields, he sleepeth not under myrtle shades, but under a hedge, nor doth he vigilantly defend his flocks from wolves, because there are none, as maister Spenser well observeth:-- Well is known that since the Saxon King Never was wolf seen, many or some, Nor in all Kent nor in Christendom." Yet a third extract from this satirical "Proeme" must be given, and this in connection with the language of these eclogues: "That principally, courteous reader, whereof I would have thee to be advertised (seeing I depart from the vulgar usage) is touching the language of my shepherds; which is soothly to say, such as is neither spoken by the country maiden or the courtly dame; nay, not only such as in the present times is not uttered, but was never uttered in times past; and, if I judge aright, will never be uttered in times future.

It having too much of the country to be fit for the court, too much of the court to be fit for the country; too much of the language of old times to be fit for the present, too much of the present to have been fit for the old, and too much of both to be fit for any time to come.

Granted also it is, that in this my language, I seem unto myself, as a London mason, who calculateth his work for a term of years, when he buildeth with old material upon a ground-rent that is not his own, which soon turneth to rubbish and ruins.

For this point, no reason can I allege, only deep learned examples having led me thereunto." All this is pretty fooling; but Gay, who in the beginning intended "The Shepherd's Week" to be merely a burlesque, according to the suggestion of Pope, was carried away by his interest in the subject-matter, and produced a poem of undoubted value as a picture of rural life in his own day.