The feeble flocks in field refuse their former food,
because Dido is dead.]
[Footnote 20: Oldham's translation of Moschus:
Ye gentle swans....
In doleful notes the heavy loss bewail
Such as you sing at your own funeral.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 21: Cowley in his verses on Echo:
Ah! gentle nymph! who lik'st so well
In hollow solitary caves to dwell.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 22: This expression of "sweet echo" is taken from
Comus.--WARTON.]
[Footnote 23: Oldham's translation of Moschus:
Sad echo too does in deep silence moan,
Since thou art mute, since thou art speechless grown.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 24: The couplet was different in the early editions:
Echo no more the rural song rebounds;
Her name alone the mournful echo sounds.]
[Footnote 25: In the MS.
Which but for you did all its incense yield.
This, with the reading in the text, was laid before Walsh, who selected
the latter.]
[Footnote 26: Oldham's translation of Moschus:
Fair Galatea too laments thy death,
Laments the ceasing of thy tuneful breath.
Sedley's Elegy:
Here sportive zephyrs cease their selfish play
Despairing now to fetch perfumes away.--WAKEFIELD.
The couplet in the text is the third passage in Pope's Pastorals for
which Ruffhead claims the merit of originality. The quotations of
Wakefield show that the thought and the language are alike borrowed, and
the only novelty is the bull, pointed out by Johnson, of making the
_zephyrs_ lament in _silence_.]
[Footnote 27: Oldham's version of Moschus: