[Footnote 5: From Dryden's version of Ecl. i. 5:
While stretched at ease you sing your happy loves,
And Amaryllis fills the shady groves.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 6: Wycherley.]
[Footnote 7: He was always very careful in his encomiums not to fall
into ridicule, the trap which weak and prostitute flatterers rarely
escape. For "sense," he would willingly have said "moral;" propriety
required it. But this dramatic poet's moral was remarkably faulty. His
plays are all shamefully profligate, both in the dialogue and
action.--WARBURTON.
Warburton's note has more the appearance of an insidious attack upon
Pope than of serious commendation; for if, as Warburton assumes, the
panegyric in the text has reference to the plays and not to the man, it
was a misplaced "encomium" to say that Wycherley "instructed" the world
by the "sense," and "swayed" them by the "judgment," which were
manifested "in a shamefully profligate dialogue and action."]
[Footnote 8: The reading was "rapture" in all editions till that of
1736.]
[Footnote 9: Few writers have less nature in them than
Wycherley.--WARTON.]
[Footnote 10: Till the edition of 1736 the following lines stood in
place of the couplet in the text:
Attend the muse, though low her numbers be,
She sings of friendship, and she sings to thee.]
[Footnote 11: Pope had Waller's Thyrsis and Galatea in his memory:
Made the wide country echo to your moan,
The list'ning trees, and savage mountains groan.--WAKEFIELD.
The groans of the trees and mountains are, in Waller's poem, the echo of
the mourner's lamentations, but to this Pope has added that the "moan"
made "the rocks weep," which has no resemblance to anything in nature.]
[Footnote 12: The lines from verse 17 to 30 are very beautiful, tender,
and melodious.--BOWLES.]
[Footnote 13: It was a time-honoured fancy that the "moan" of the
turtle-dove was a lament for the loss of its mate. _Turtur_, the Latin
name for the bird, is a correct representation of its monotonous note.
The poets commonly call it simply the turtle, but since the term, to
quote the explanation of Johnson in his Dictionary, is also "used by
sailors and gluttons for a tortoise" the description of its "deep
murmurs" as "filling the sounding shores," calls up this secondary
sense, and gives an air of ludicrousness to the passage.]
[Footnote 14: This whole passage is imitated from Sir Philip Sidney's
Arcadia, Book iii. p. 712, 8vo ed.:
Earth, brook, flow'rs, pipe, lamb, dove,
Say all, and I with them,
Absence is death, or worse, to them that love.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 15: Congreve's Mourning Muse of Alexis: