[Footnote 29: Pope uses "preventing" in the then common but now obsolete
sense of "anticipating."]
[Footnote 30: A river in the lower world.]
[Footnote 31: Great is the force and the spirit of these lines down to
verse 183; and indeed they are a surprising effort in a writer so young
as when he translated them. See particularly lines 150 to 160.--WARTON.]
[Footnote 32: The entrance to the infernal regions was said to be
through a cave in the Taenarian promontory, which formed the southern
extremity of Greece.]
[Footnote 33: Pope has judiciously tamed the bombast image "caligantes
animarum examine campos," "the plains darkened with a swarm of ghosts."
"Lucentes equos," he translates, "fair glories," omitting the image
entirely. To mount Atlas he has added an idea which makes the passage
more ridiculous than sublime. It is poorly expressed in the original; in
the translation it is ludicrous; "and shook the heavens _and gods he
bore_." There are many images which if indistinctly seen are sublime; if
particularised they become quite the contrary. However, the translation
is certainly wonderful, when the age of the author is considered. It
shows his powers of metrical language, at so early a period of his
poetical studies, though it is very unfaithful in particular
passages.--BOWLES.]
[Footnote 34: Pope's acquaintance with Latin prosody, from his confined
education, was probably very small, or he would not have used Mal[=e]a,
instead of Mal[)e]a, with the line of Statius before him.--BOWLES.]
[Footnote 35: "Well-known," because the Fury had before visited the
Theban palace to instigate the crimes and passions of which it had been
the scene. The haste with which she goes, and her preference for the
terrestrial journey, even over the haunts of her own Tartarus, indicate
the signal malevolence of the mission. Hence the delight she takes in
it.]
[Footnote 36: The original is more forcible and less extravagant. The
sunken eyes of the Fury glared with a light like that of red-hot
iron--_ferrea lux_.]
[Footnote 37: This expression, which is not in Statius, is common with
Dryden, as in his Virg. AEn. x. 582: