[Footnote 45: Confucius flourished about two thousand three hundred
years ago, just before Pythagoras. He taught justice, obedience to
parents, humility, and universal benevolence: and he practised these
virtues when he was a first minister, and when he was reduced to poverty
and exile.--WARTON.]
[Footnote 46: The learning of the old Egyptian priests consisted for the
most part in geometry and astronomy: they also preserved the history of
their nation. Their greatest hero upon record is Sesostris, whose
actions and conquests may be seen at large in Diodorus, &c. He is said
to have caused the kings he vanquished to draw him in his chariot. The
posture of his statue, in these verses, is correspondent to the
description which Herodotus gives of one of them, remaining in his own
time.--POPE.]
[Footnote 47: The colossal statue of the celebrated Eastern tyrant is
not very strongly imagined. The word "hold" is particularly
feeble.--WARTON.]
[Footnote 48: Virgil's giant Bitias, AEn. ix. 958, has in Dryden's
translation, quoted by Wakefield, "a coat of double mail with scales of
gold."]
[Footnote 49: Two flatter lines upon such a subject cannot well be
imagined.--BOWLES.]
[Footnote 50: The architecture is agreeable to that part of the
world.--POPE.]
[Footnote 51: The learning of the northern nations lay more obscure than
that of the rest. Zamolxis was the disciple of Pythagoras, who taught
the immortality of the soul to the Scythians.--POPE.
They worshipped Zamolxis, and thought they should go to him when they
died. He was said by the Greeks who dwelt on the shores of the
Hellespont, to have been the slave of Pythagoras before he became the
instructor of his countrymen, but Herodotus believed that if Zamolxis
ever existed, he was long anterior to the Greek philosopher.]
[Footnote 52: Odin, or Woden, was the great legislator and hero of the
Goths. They tell us of him, that, being subject to fits, he persuaded
his followers, that during those trances he received inspirations, from
whence he dictated his laws. He is said to have been the inventor of the
Runic characters.--POPE.]
[Footnote 53: Pope borrowed this idea from the passage he quotes at ver.
179, where Chaucer describes Statius as standing
Upon an iron pillar strong
That painted was, all endelong,
With tigers' blood in every place.]
[Footnote 54: These were the priests and poets of those people, so
celebrated for their savage virtue. Those heroic barbarians accounted it
a dishonour to die in their beds, and rushed on to certain death in the
prospect of an after-life, and for the glory of a song from their bards
in praise of their actions.--POPE.
The opinion was general among the Goths that men who died natural deaths
went into vast caves underground, all dark and miry, full of noisome
creatures, and there for ever grovelled in stench and misery. On the
contrary, all who died in battle went to the hall of Odin, their god of
war, where they were entertained at infinite tables in perpetual feasts,
carousing in bowls made of the skulls of the enemies they had
slain.--SIR W. TEMPLE.]
[Footnote 55:
It shone lighter than a glass,
And made well more than it was,
To semen every thing, ywis,
As kind of thinge Fames is.--POPE.]
[Footnote 56: Addison's Vision: "On a sudden the trumpet sounded; the
whole fabric shook, and the doors flew open."]
[Footnote 57: Milton, Par. Lost, i. 717: