"Where the tall jar erects its stately pride,
With antic shapes in China's azure dyed."
3. _The azure flowers that blow_. Johnson and Wakefield find fault
with this as redundant, but it is no more so than poetic usage
allows. In the _Progress of Poesy_, i. 1, we have again: "The
laughing flowers that round them blow." Cf. _Comus_, 992:
"Iris there with humid bow
Waters the odorous banks that blow
Flowers of more mingled hue
Than her purfled scarf can shew."
4. _Tabby_. For the derivation of this word from the French _tabis_,
a kind of silk, see Wb. In the first ed. the 5th line preceded the
4th.
6. _The lake_. In the mock-heroic vein that runs through the whole
poem.
11. _Jet_. This word comes, through the French, from Gagai, a town in
Lycia, where the mineral was first obtained.
14. _Two angel forms_. In the first ed. "two beauteous forms," which
Mitford prefers to the present reading, "as the images of _angel_ and
_genii_ interfere with each other, and bring different associations
to the mind."
16. _Tyrian hue_. Explained by the "purple" in next line; an allusion
to the famous Tyrian dye of the ancients. Cf. Pope, _Windsor Forest_,
142: "with fins of Tyrian dye."