[Footnote 11: This line is another of the embellishments which Pope
engrafted on the original.]
[Footnote 12: The first line of this couplet is faulty in point of
versification, and, to use our bard's own remark, ten low words creep in
one dull line. As to the last line, it is wholly redundant, and has no
place in the original.--RUFFHEAD.]
[Footnote 13: In the original, Erycina, which was a surname of Venus
from Mount Eryx, in Sicily, where a celebrated temple was dedicated to
her.]
[Footnote 14: He has here left four lines untranslated, which are thus
rendered in the MS.:
My ruined brother trades from shore to shore,
And gains as basely as he lost before:
Me too he hates, advised by me in vain,
So fatal 'tis to be sincere and plain.
Of the last couplet the MS. contains a second version:
He hates his sister for a sister's care,
So unsuccessful 'tis to be sincere.]
[Footnote 15: In the MS.:
An infant now my hapless fortunes shares,
And this sad breast feels all a mother's cares.]
[Footnote 16: Cephalus tells the story poetically in Sandys' translation
of Ovid's Met. vii. 701. He was a hunter, who was setting his nets in
early dawn,
When grey Aurora, having vanquished night,
Beheld me on the ever-fragrant hill
Of steep Hymettus, and against my will,
As I my toils extended, bare me thence.]
[Footnote 17: Cynthia prolonged the sleep of Endymion, a shepherd of
singular beauty, that she might kiss him without his knowledge.]
[Footnote 18: Scrope is pleasing here:
Oh! let me once more see those eyes of thine!
Thy love I ask not; do but suffer mine.--WAKEFIELD.
Pope's couplet was as follows in the MS.:
Thy love I ask not to forsaken me,
All that I ask is but to doat on thee.
"Scrope melius hic," wrote Cromwell, and though Pope altered the lines
the remark of Cromwell remains true.]
[Footnote 19: Ruffhead observes, that this line is superior to the
original,
Aspice, quam sit in hoc multa litura loco;
which he thinks flat and languid: but the simplicity of the appeal to
the blot on her paper is admirable, and should be only mentioned as a
fact. The imitator has destroyed the whole beauty of the line, by a
quaint antithesis, and a laboured arrangement of words, which are not
natural in affliction. Scrope's translation again excels Pope's:
My constant falling tears the paper stain,
And my weak hand, etc.--BOWLES.]
[Footnote 20: "The parenthesis is an interpolation," says a note
transcribed by Richardson from Pope's manuscript, and the remark is
equally applicable to the next line.]
[Footnote 21: In the first edition,
No gift on thee thy Sappho could confer.