Pope, as a boy, took the matter seriously, and always retained a natural fondness for a juvenile performance upon which he had expended great labour, and which was the chief proof of his extreme precocity.

He invites attention to his own merits, and claims especially the virtue of propriety.

He does not, he tells us, like some other people, make his roses and daffodils bloom in the same season, and cause his nightingales to sing in November; and he takes particular credit for having remembered that there were no wolves in England, and having accordingly excised a passage in which Alexis prophesied that those animals would grow milder as they listened to the strains of his favourite nymph.

When a man has got so far as to bring to England all the pagan deities, and rival shepherds contending for bowls and lambs in alternate strophes, these niceties seem a little out of place.

After swallowing such a camel of an anachronism as is contained in the following lines, it is ridiculous to pride oneself upon straining at a gnat:-- Inspire me, says Strephon, Inspire me, Phoebus, in my Delia's praise With Waller's strains or Granville's moving lays.
A milkwhite bull shall at your altars stand, That threats a fight, and spurns the rising sand.
Granville would certainly not have felt more surprised at meeting a wolf, than at seeing a milk-white bull sacrificed to Phoebus on the banks of the Thames.