[Footnote 60:
Praecipites alta vitam sub nube relinquunt. Virg.--WARBURTON.
So before Pope, Philips in his Cider:
----they leave their little lives above the clouds.--STEEVENS.
[Footnote 61: It is singular, that in a poem on a forest, the majestic
oak, the deer, and many other interesting and characteristic
circumstances, should be all thrown in the distant ground, whilst
objects much less appropriate, the fisher, the fowler, &c. are brought
forward.--BOWLES.]
[Footnote 62: The active use of the word hope, though authorised by
Dryden, appears to my taste intolerably harsh and affected.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 63: "Volume," except in its application to books, now carries
with it an idea of magnitude. In Pope's day it was still used in its
strictly etymological sense. When Milton, in his personification of Sin
(Par. Lost, ii. 651), says that she
ended foul in many a scaly fold
Voluminous and vast,
"voluminous" is the synonym for "many a scaly fold," and not for the
conjoint epithet "vast."]
[Footnote 64: Wakefield points out that Pope borrowed the language from
Lauderdale's translation of the fourth Georgic, where he says of the
bees that they are "bedropped with gold," or from Milton's description
of the fish, which
sporting with quick glance
Show to the sun their waved coats dropt with gold.]
[Footnote 65: "The wat'ry plain" from the _campi liquentes_ of Virgil,
is an expression of Dryden's in his translation of Ovid, Met. i., and
elsewhere. Drayton in his Polyolbion has the tyrant pike.--WAKEFIELD.
"The luce, or pike," says Walton, "is the tyrant of the fresh waters."]
[Footnote 66: Originally thus:
But when bright Phoebus from the twins invites
Our active genius to more free delights,
With springing day we range the lawns around.--POPE.]
[Footnote 67: "Sylvan _war_," is an expression borrowed from writers who
described the chase of ferocious beasts,--the lion, tiger, and boar. The
language is inapplicable to the pursuit of such timid creatures as the
hare, deer, and fox.]
[Footnote 68: Translated from Statius.
Stare adeo miserum est, pereunt vestigia mille
Ante fugam, absentemque ferit gravis ungula campum.
These lines Mr. Dryden, in his preface to his translation of Fresnoy's
Art of Painting, calls wonderfully fine, and says "they would cost him
an hour, if he had the leisure, to translate them, there is so much of
beauty in the original," which was the reason, I suppose, why Mr. Pope
tried his strength with them.--WARBURTON.]
[Footnote 69: "Threatening" is an inappropriate epithet for the sloping
hills up which the hunters rode in the neighbourhood of Windsor.]
[Footnote 70: Instead of this couplet, Pope had written in his early
manuscript,
They stretch, they sweat, they glow, they shout around;
Heav'n trembles, roar the mountains, thunders all the ground.
He was betrayed into this bombast, which his better taste rejected, by
the attempt to carry on the hyperbolical strain of Statius.]
[Footnote 71: Queen Anne.--WARBURTON.
Congreve's Prologue to the Queen:
For never was in Rome nor Athens seen
So fair a circle, and so bright a queen.]
[Footnote 72: This use of the word "reign" for the territory ruled over,
instead of for the sway of the ruler, was always uncommon, and is now
obsolete. Queen Anne is mentioned in connection with the chase and the
"immortal huntress," because her favourite diversion before she grew
unwieldy and inactive, was to follow the hounds in her chaise.]
[Footnote 73: Better in the manuscript:
And rules the boundless empire of the main.
By the alteration Pope increased the compliment to Anne by making her
the light of the earth as well as mistress of the forest and the sea.
Wakefield thinks that this application to the queen of the offices of
Diana as goddess of the woods, the luminary of the night, and the chief
agent in the production of the tides, is happily conceived, but the moon
and the monarch were "the light of the earth "and "empress of the main"
in such different senses, that the line is a trivial play upon words.]
[Footnote 74: In the last edition published in Pope's lifetime, the four
previous lines, with the variation of "sunny heaths" for "airy wastes,"
were printed in a note, and their place in the text was supplied by a
single couplet:
Here, as old bards have sung, Diana strayed,
Bathed in the springs, or sought the cooling shade.
Wakefield suggests that Pope rejected this latter line, as not being
suited to the prevailing character of the English climate, but at ver.
209 he represents the goddess as often "laving" in the Lodona, and to
bathe and luxuriate in shade are surely common enough in England.]
[Footnote 75: Dr. Warton says, "that Johnson seems to have passed too
severe a censure on this episode of Lodona; and that a tale in a
descriptive poem has a good effect." Johnson does not object to a tale
in a descriptive poem. He objects only to the triteness of such a tale
as this.--BOWLES.]
[Footnote 76: Dryden's Translations from Ovid:
The nicest eye did no distinction know,
But that the goddess bore a golden bow.]
[Footnote 77:
Nec positu variare comas; uni fibula vestem,
Vitta coercuerat neglectos alba capillos. Ovid.--WARBURTON.]
[Footnote 78: This thought of the quiver sounding is found both in Homer
and Virgil.--WAKEFIELD.
Pope remembered Dryden's translation of Virgil, AEneis, xi. 968:
Diana's arms upon her shoulder sounds.
And xi. 1140: