The poem to Pollio is, indeed, of another kind:
it is filled with images at once splendid and pleasing,
and is elevated with grandeur of language
worthy of the first of Roman poets; but I am not
able to reconcile myself to the disproportion between
the performance and the occasion that produced it:
that the golden age should return because Pollio
had a son, appears so wild a fiction, that I am ready
to suspect the poet of having written, for some
other purpose, what he took this opportunity of
producing to the publick.
The fifth contains a celebration of Daphnis, which
has stood to all succeeding ages as the model of
pastoral elegies. To deny praise to a performance
which so many thousands have laboured to imitate,
would be to judge with too little deference for the
opinion of mankind: yet whoever shall read it with
impartiality, will find that most of the images are of
the mythological kind, and therefore easily invented;
and that there are few sentiments of rational praise
or natural lamentation.
In the Silenus he again rises to the dignity of
philosophick sentiments, and heroick poetry. The
address to Varus is eminently beautiful: but since
the compliment paid to Gallus fixes the transaction
to his own time, the fiction of Silenus seems
injudicious: nor has any sufficient reason yet been found,
to justify his choice of those fables that make the
subject of the song.
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