[Footnote 58: Wakefield understood Pope to mean that the trees shaded
the doves, and he objected that leafless trees could not properly be
said to overshadow. Steevens pointed out that it was the doves, on the
contrary, which overshadowed the trees, by alighting on them in flocks.
The ambiguity was caused by Pope's bad and inveterate habit of putting
the accusative case before the verb.]
[Footnote 59:
The fowler lifts his levelled tube on high.--POPE.
He owed the line in the text to Dryden's Virgil, Geor. ii. 774.
And bends his bow, and levels with his eyes.
"Tube" is an affected term for a gun, but the word is adopted by Cowper
and Campbell. Thomson, in his lines on partridge-shooting, was not
afraid to call the gun by its own name, and yet is more poetical than
Cowper, Campbell, or Pope:
the gun
Glanced just and sudden from the fowler's eye,
O'ertakes their sounding pinions.