A novel train! the brood of old Romance,
Conceived by Folly on the coast of France,
That now with lighter thought and gentler fire,
Usurp the honours of their drooping sire: 
And still fantastic, vain, and trifling, sing
Of many a soft and inconsistent thing,—­
Of rakes repenting, clogged in Hymen’s chain,
Of nymph reclined by unpresuming swain,
Of captains, colonels, lords, and amorous knights,
That find in humbler nymphs such chaste delights. 
Such heavenly charms, so gentle, yet so gay,
That all their former follies fly away: 
Honour springs up, where’er their looks impart
A moment’s sunshine to the hardened heart;
A virtue, just before the rover’s jest,
Grows like a mushroom in his melting breast. 
Much too they tell of cottages and shades. 
Of balls, and routs, and midnight masquerades,
Where dangerous men and dangerous mirth reside,
And Virtue goes——­on purpose to be tried. 
These are the tales that wake the soul to life,
That charm the sprightly niece and forward wife,
That form the manners of a polished age,
And each pure easy moral of the stage.

  FROM THE VILLAGE

  The village life, and every care that reigns
  O’er youthful peasants and declining swains;
  What labour yields, and what, that labour past,
  Age, in its hour of languor, finds at last;
  What form the real picture of the poor,
  Demand a song—­the Muse can give no more.

  Fled are those times when, in harmonious strains,
  The rustic poet praised his native plains;
  No shepherds now, in smooth alternate verse,
  Their country’s beauty or their nymphs’ rehearse: 
  Yet still for these we frame the tender strain;
  Still in our lays fond Corydons complain,
  And shepherds’ boys their amorous pains reveal—­
  The only pains, alas! they never feel.

  On Mincio’s banks, in Caesar’s bounteous reign,
  If Tityrus found the Golden Age again,
  Must sleepy bards the flattering dream prolong,
  Mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song? 
  From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,
  Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way? 
  Yes, thus the Muses sing of happy swains,
  Because the Muses never knew their pains. 
  They boast their peasants’ pipes; but peasants now
  Resign their pipes and plod behind the plough,
  And few amid the rural tribe have time
  To number syllables and play with rhyme: 
  Save honest Duck, what son of verse could share
  The poet’s rapture and the peasant’s care,
  Or the great labours of the field degrade
  With the new peril of a poorer trade?

  From this chief cause these idle praises spring—­
  That themes so easy few forbear to sing,
  For no deep thought the trifling subjects ask;
  To sing of shepherds is an easy task: 
  The happy youth assumes the common strain,
  A nymph his mistress, and himself a swain;
  With no sad scenes he clouds his tuneful prayer,
  But all, to look like her, is painted fair.