[Footnote 51: It stood thus in the first editions:
Pleased in the general's sight, the host lie down
Sudden before some unsuspecting town;
The young, the old, one instant make our prize,
And o'er their captive heads Britannia's standard flies.--WARBURTON.
Pope, as Wakefield observes, has joined together in the simile in the
text the inconsistent notions of a town surprised, and a town taken by
the regular approaches of a siege. "The passage," adds Wakefield, "as it
originally stood was free from this heterogeneous intermixture, and by a
little polish might have been made superior to the present reading."]
[Footnote 52: Richardson gives a more descriptive line from the
manuscript:
Exults in air and plies his whistling wings.
The poet doubtless substituted the later version, because the expression
"whirring pheasant" conveyed the same idea as "whistling wings."]
[Footnote 53: This fine apostrophe was probably suggested by that of
Virgil on the ox dying of the plague: