Thomas Purney's A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) is less a systematic theory than a series of pointed judgments delivered with a critic's impatience. Purney divides beautiful images into three classes: simple images (a fair shepherdess), images with a scene (the shepherdess on a stream bank), and images with action (the shepherdess asleep while her lover smooths her wind-fluttered clothes). This taxonomy, he admits, is not meant to be imposed on others, but it drives his evaluations throughout the treatise.

Purney's method is consistently evaluative: he ranks, compares, and dismisses. He praises a passage from Ambrose Philips as containing the most beautiful image in any pastoral writer, yet wonders why Philips did not employ such beauty in his earlier pieces. Spenser, he claims, had a mind naturally formed for pleasurable writing, but his Shepheardes Calender lacks beautiful images—the Faerie Queene contains more pastoral imagery per eight lines than all of Spenser's pastorals combined. Such specific, sometimes contrarian judgments give the Enquiry its character.

A Three-Tiered System of Pastoral Images

Purney's central contribution is his classification of beautiful images into three ranks, which he presents as a personal system rather than a universal rule. The first and least delightful sort is a simple image, such as “a Fair Shepherdess.” The second adds a scene: the shepherdess “sitting on the Banks of a pleasant streamlet.” The third and finest kind includes action: “the Image of a fair Shepherdess, on the Banks of a pleasant Stream asleep, and her innocent Lover harmlessly smoothing her Cloaths as flutter'd by the Wind.”

This hierarchy privileges narrative motion within a static picture. Purney does not merely describe categories; he uses them to judge. The passage he selects from Philips—ending with “Condemn me, Shepherds, if I did amiss”—exemplifies both a beautiful image and a pastoral thought of the best sort. The system is practical, not abstract, and it allows Purney to explain why certain passages please while others fail.

Spenser, Ovid, and the Pleasurable Fancy

Purney identifies two writers whose minds were “form'd for Pastoral Images”: Ovid and Spenser. He argues that Spenser's Faerie Queene contains more pleasurable pastoral images in every eight lines than all of his Shepheardes Calender. The Calender is sustained, Purney claims, by its pastoral language, which Spenser “took excessive pains about,” but not by its imagery.

This distinction between language and image is crucial. Purney implies that a poet can labor over diction yet still lack the natural fancy required for vivid pictures. Ovid, similarly, is praised for his perpetual recourse to pastoral in the Metamorphoses. Yet Purney also notes a flaw: poets with pleasurable fancies often refuse to bring their minds “under the Regulation of Art,” leading to excessive length in descriptions. The tension between natural genius and artistic discipline runs through the treatise.

Descriptive Length and the Calm Nature of Pastoral

In a chapter on pastoral descriptions, Purney argues that the genre requires a diffuse, unhurried style. He contrasts the “heat of Love” in poems like Sappho's, where circumstances should be “couch'd extreamly close,” with epic, where they are “somewhat less closely heap'd together,” and pastoral, which demands the most diffuse arrangement because of its “extreamly calm and sedate” nature.

This principle leads to a practical warning: cold descriptions weary readers unless they are concise. Yet the very poets who excel at pastoral images—Ovid and Spenser—offend by being too lengthy. Purney's criticism is thus double-edged: he admires their natural gifts but regrets their lack of artistic control. The Enquiry does not resolve this tension; it simply registers it as a recurring problem in pastoral writing.

Purney's Enquiry is best approached as a working critic's notebook rather than a finished theory. His rankings and classifications are offered provisionally, and his judgments are grounded in specific passages. Readers interested in eighteenth-century debates about genre, imagination, and the psychology of aesthetic pleasure will find here a compact, opinionated specimen of early neoclassical criticism in transition.