As touching the following literary effort of Esquire Biglow, much might be profitably said on the topick of Idyllick and Pastoral Poetry, and concerning the proper distinctions to be made between them, from Theocritus, the inventor of the former, to Collins, the latest authour I know of who has emulated the classicks in the latter style.  But in the time of a civil war worthy a Milton to defend and a Lucan to sing, it may be reasonably doubted whether the publick, never too studious of serious instruction, might not consider other objects more deserving of present attention.  Concerning the title of Idyll, which Mr. Biglow has adopted at my suggestion, it may not be improper to animadvert, that the name properly signifies a poem somewhat rustick in phrase, (for, though the learned are not agreed as to the particular dialect employed by Theocritus, they are universanimous both as to its rusticity and its capacity of rising now and then to the level of more elevated sentiments and expressions,) while it is also descriptive of real scenery and manners.  Yet it must be admitted that the production now in question (which here and there bears perhaps too plainly the marks of my correcting hand) does partake of the nature of a Pastoral, inasmuch as the interlocutors therein are purely imaginary beings, and the whole is little better than [Greek:  skias onar.] The plot was, as I believe, suggested by the “Twa Briggs” of Robert Burns, a Scottish poet of the last century, as that found its prototype in the “Mutual Complaint of Plainstanes and Causey” by Fergusson, though the metre of this latter be different by a foot in each verse.  I reminded my talented young parishioner and friend that Concord Bridge had long since yielded to the edacious tooth of Time.  But he answered me to this effect:  that there was no greater mistake of an authour than to suppose the reader had no fancy of his own; that, if once that faculty was to be called into activity, it were better to be in for the whole sheep than the shoulder; and that he knew Concord like a book,—­an expression questionable in propriety, since there are few things with which he is not more familiar than with the printed page.  In proof of what he affirmed, he showed me some verses which with others he had stricken out as too much delaying the action, but which I communicate in this place because they rightly define “punkin-seed,” (which Mr. Bartlett would have a kind of perch,—­a creature to which I have found a rod or pole not to be so easily equivalent in our inland waters as in the books of arithmetic,) and because it conveys an eulogium on the worthy son of an excellent father, with whose acquaintance (eheu, fugaces anni!) I was formerly honoured.

  “But nowadays the Bridge ain’t wut they show,
  So much ez Em’son, Hawthorne, an’ Thoreau. 
  I know the village, though:  was sent there once
  A-schoolin’, coz to home I played the dunce;
  An’ I’ve ben sence a-visitin’