[Footnote 4: Our poet has not varied much here from the couplet of his
predecessor, Sir Carr Scrope:
I burn, I burn, like kindled fields of corn,
When by the driving winds the flames are borne.--WAKEFIELD.
The first version in Pope's manuscript, though not so closely copied
from Scrope, is decidedly inferior to the text:
I burn, I burn, as when fierce whirlwinds raise
The spreading flames, and crackling harvests blaze.]
[Footnote 5: A childish, false thought.--WARTON.]
[Footnote 6: Scrope's couplet exceeds this in simplicity, and to my
taste, on the whole, is preferable:
My muse, and lute can now no longer please;
These are th' employments of a mind at ease.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 7: As Ovid tells the story in his Metamorphoses, Apollo fell
in love with Daphne and pursued her. When he was gaining upon her in the
race she was transformed, at her own request, into a laurel. The Cretan
dame was Ariadne. Bacchus was smitten with her extraordinary beauty, and
married her.]
[Footnote 8: This happy line, which is not too extravagant for a lover,
belongs to Pope.]
[Footnote 9: Andromeda, the daughter of Cepheus, an AEthiopian king. Her
mother thought herself superior in beauty to the Nereids, which excited
their jealousy, and through their influence a sea-monster was sent to
prey upon man and beast in the dominions of Cepheus. To atone for her
mother's vanity, and rid the land of the scourge, Cepheus agreed to
offer up Andromeda to the monster. She was chained to a rock on the
coast, where Perseus saw her at the critical moment when she was about
to be devoured. Captivated by her charms he engaged and slew the
monster, and made Andromeda his wife.]
[Footnote 10: This is very inferior to the conciseness, and simplicity
of the original, "memini (meminerunt omnia amantes)." Sir Carr Scrope's
translation is nearer the original, and more natural as well as elegant: