[Footnote 7: Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse:
And Albion's rocks repeat his rural song.--WAKEFIELD.
The term "Albion's cliffs," which is usually appropriated to the steeps
that bound the sea-shore, is applied by Pope to the hills about
Windsor.]
[Footnote 8: The expression in this verse is philosophically just. True
wisdom is the knowledge of ourselves, which terminates in a conviction
of our absolute insignificancy with respect to God, and our relative
inferiority in many instances to the accomplishments of our own species:
and power is encompassed with such a multiplicity of dangerous
temptations as to be almost incompatible with virtue. A passage in
Lucan, viii. 493, is very apposite:
exeat aula
Qui vult esse pius. Virtus et summa potestas
Non coeunt.
He who would spotless live from courts must go:
No union power supreme and virtue know.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 9: Waller, The Maid's Tragedy Altered:
Happy is she that from the world retires,
And carries with her what the world admires.--WILKES.]
[Footnote 10: Sir W. Trumbull was born in Windsor-forest, to which he
retreated after he had resigned the post of secretary of state of King
William III.--POPE.
The address to Trumbull was not in the original manuscript which passed
through his hands, and the lines were probably added when the Pastorals
were prepared for the press. "Little Pope," wrote Sir William to the
Rev. Ralph Bridges on May 2, 1709, "was here two days ago, always full
of poetry and services to Mr. Bridges. I saw in the advertisement, after
he was gone, the Miscellany is published, or publishing, by Jacob
Tonson, wherein are his Pastorals, and which is worse, I am told one of
them is inscribed to my worship." A more inappropriate panegyric could
not have been devised than to pretend that Trumbull was among poets what
the nightingale was among birds. The retired statesman had a true taste
for literature, but his efforts as a versifier had been limited to a
dozen lines translated from Martial.]
[Footnote 11: Warton observes that the nightingale does not sing till
the other birds are at rest. This is a mistake; the nightingale sings by
day as well as at night, but the expressions "to rest removes" and
"forsaken groves" give an idea of evening, in which case there would be
certainly an error in making the thrush "chant" after the nightingale.
As to the thrush being "charmed to silence" at any time by the
nightingale, and the "aerial audience" applauding, it is allowable as a
fanciful allusion, perhaps, though the circumstance is contrary to
nature and fact.--BOWLES.]
[Footnote 12: Concanen, in a pamphlet called A Supplement to the
Profound, objected to the use of an image borrowed from the theatre, and
Pope, in vindication of his line, has written "Dryden" in the margin,
alluding doubtless to a couplet in Dryden's verses to the Duchess of
York:
Each poet of the air her glory sings
And round him the pleased audience clap their wings.
Every one must feel the image to be burlesque, and even Dryden's
authority cannot recommend it.]
[Footnote 13: The scene of this Pastoral a valley, the time the morning.
It stood originally thus,
Daphnis and Strephon to the shades retired,
Both warmed by love, and by the muse inspired,
Fresh as the morn, and as the season fair,
In flow'ry vales they fed their fleecy care;
And while Aurora gilds the mountain's side,
Thus Daphnis spoke, and Strephon thus replied.--POPE.
There was in the manuscript a still earlier, and perhaps better, version
of the first two lines:
Daphnis and Strephon led their flocks along,
Both famed for love and both renowned in song.
They were however borrowed from Lycon, an Eclogue, in the fifth part of
Tonson's Miscellany:
Strephon and Damon's flocks together fed,
Both famed for wit, and famed for beauty both.
Wakefield points out that the opening verse of the couplet, as it stands
in the text, was indebted to Congreve's Tears of Amaryllis for Amyntas:
When woolly flocks their bleating cries renew,
And from their fleecy sides first shake the silver dew.]
[Footnote 14: The epithet "whitening" most happily describes the
progressive effect of the light.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 15: Dryden's Palamon and Arcite: