Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan

undeniably English while Cambria, nominally a part of the national hybrid “Great Britain,” is not English, even though it is relatively unadulterated by a francophilic culture. Hence, the articulation of an urban English society is absolutely contingent on the partial return of this “foreign” pastoral. Although the pastoral always functions as a way of positioning moral values, what complicates and perhaps even undermines the representation of those values in this poem is the division of the poetic and the authoritative voice: simple binarisms and symmetrical oppositions are not enough to account for the ambivalent representation of urban politics in this satire. Thales, the dominant voice, whom many have claimed to be the voice of Richard Savage,⁴⁰ argues for the pastoral life, not so much for its inherent virtues but for its difference from London—differences about which he is self-consciously ambivalent—while the first-person speaker remains allied with the city, even while ventriloquizing Thales’s position.

      Though grief and fondness in my breast rebel,

      When injured Thales bids the town farewell

      Yet still my calmer thoughts his choice commend,

      I praise the hermit, but regret the friend,

      Resolved at length, from vice and London far,

      To breathe in distant fields a purer air. (ll.1–6)