(1688) Fontenelle, with studied and impertinent disregard for the
Ancients and for "ceux qui professent cette espèce de religion que
l'on s'est faite d'adorer l'antiquité," expressly states that the
basic criterion by which he worked was "les lumières naturelles de
la raison" (_OEuvres_, Paris, 1790, V, 36). It is careless and
incorrect to imply that Rapin's and Fontenelle's theories of
pastoral poetry are similar, as Pope, Joseph Warton, and many other
critics and scholars have done. Judged by basic critical principles,
method, or content there is a distinct difference between Rapin and
Fontenelle. Rapin is primarily a neoclassicist in his "Treatise";
Fontenelle, a rationalist in his "Discours." It is this opposition,
then, of neoclassicism and rationalism, that constitutes the basic
issue of pastoral criticism in England during the Restoration and the
early part of the eighteenth century.

When Fontenelle's "Discours" was translated in 1695, the first phrase
of it quoted above was translated as "those Pedants who profess a
kind of Religion which consists of worshipping the Ancients" (p.294).
Fontenelle's phrase more nearly than that of the English translator
describes Rapin. Though Rapin's erudition was great, he escaped the
quagmire of pedantry. He refers most frequently to the scholiasts and
editors in "_The First Part_" (which is so trivial that one wonders
why he ever troubled to accumulate so much insignificant material),
but after quoting them he does not hesitate to call their ideas
"pedantial" (p. 24) and to refer to their statements as grammarian's
"prattle" (p. 11). And, though at times it seems that his curiosity
and industry impaired his judgment, Rapin does draw significant ideas
from such scholars and critics as Quintilian, Vives, Scaliger,
Donatus, Vossius, Servius, Minturno, Heinsius, and Salmasius.