[Footnote 13: Dryden's translation of Ovid's Met. book xii.:
Confused and chiding, like the hollow roar
Of tides, receding from th' insulted shore;
Or like the broken thunder heard from far
When Jove at distance drives the rolling war.
This is more poetically expressed than the same image in our author.
Dryden's lines are superior to the original.--WARTON.
Pope copied Dryden's translation of Ovid, and for this reason did not
quote the parallel passage from Chaucer's second book of the House of
Fame, where the eagle, when they come within hearing of the swell of
indistinct voices, holds a colloquy with the poet on the phenomenon:
"And what sound is it like?" quoth he.
"Peter! beating of the sea,"
Quoth I, "against the rockes hollow,
When tempest doth the shippes swallow,
Or elles like the last humbling
After the clap of a thundring."
"Peter" is an exclamation; and the sense is, "By St. Peter it is like
the beating of the sea against the hollow rocks." In Pope's poem no
cause is assigned for the "wild promiscuous sound." In Chaucer it is
produced by the confluence of the talk upon earth, every word of which
is conveyed to the House of Fame.]
[Footnote 14: Chaucer's third book of Fame:
It stood upon so high a rock,
Higher standeth none in Spayne--
What manner stone this rock was,
For it was like a lymed glass,
But that it shone full more clere;
But of what congeled matere
It was, I niste redily;
But at the last espied I,
And found that it was every dele,
A rock of ice and not of stele.--POPE.
The temple of Fame is represented on a foundation of ice, to signify the
brittle nature and precarious tenure, as well as the difficult
attainment of that possession, according to the poet himself below, ver.
504:
So hard to gain, so easy to be lost.--WAKEFIELD.
Having complained that it was contrary to the laws of sight to suppose
that a prospect in sleep could be extended beyond the ordinary range of
mortal vision, Dennis proceeds to contend that for a rock to be
sustained in the air was contrary to the eternal laws of gravitation,
"which," says Pope sarcastically, in a manuscript note, "no dream ought
to be." The cavil of Dennis was as false in science as in criticism, for
it is not more contrary to the laws of gravitation for a rock to be
suspended in space than for the earth itself.]
[Footnote 15: Dryden, AEneis, vi. 193: