The Works of Alexander Pope Part 70

Dryden's translation:

And feeds with secret joy her silent breast.

In Virgil the silent exultation is felt by a mother, who, in an a.s.sembly of nymphs, marks the superior beauty of her G.o.ddess daughter. There was not the same reason why the swain should keep secret the transport he felt at the sight of wheat fields.]

[Footnote 45: Originally:

O may no more a foreign master's rage, With wrongs yet legal, curse a future age!

Still spread, fair liberty! thy heav'nly wings, Breathe plenty on the fields, and fragrance on the springs.--POPE.

The last couplet was suggested by Addison's Letter to Lord Halifax:

O Liberty, thou G.o.ddess heav'nly bright, Profuse of bliss, and pregnant with delight!

Eternal pleasures in thy presence reign, And smiling plenty leads thy wanton train.]

[Footnote 46: Addison's Campaign:

Their courage dwells not in a troubled flood Of mounting spirits, and fermenting blood.

[Footnote 47: "Thickest woods" till Warburton's edition. The epithet "gameful," to express that the woods were full of game, seems to be peculiar to Pope.]

[Footnote 48: Originally:

When yellow autumn summer's heat succeeds, And into wine the purple harvest bleeds, The partridge feeding in the new-shorn fields, Both morning sports and evening pleasures yields.--POPE.

Richardson transcribes from the margin of Pope's MS. "Qu. if allowable to describe the season by a circ.u.mstance not proper to our climate, the vintage?" And the line which speaks of the making of wine was no doubt altered to obviate this objection.]

[Footnote 49: Dryden's Sigismonda and Guiscardo:

Watchful to betray With inward rage he meditates his prey.--HOLT WHITE.]

[Footnote 50: From Virgil, Geo. iv. 176:

si parra licet componere magnis.

If little things with great we may compare. Dryden.--WAKEFIELD.]

[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 pa.s.sage," 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 ma.n.u.script:

Exults in air and plies his whistling wings.

The poet doubtless subst.i.tuted 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:

Now what avails his well-deserving toil. Dryden.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 54: Steevens quotes Pictaeque volucres. Virg. Painted birds.

Dryden.--BOWLES.

Pope probably took the phrase from Paradise Lost, where the birds are described as spreading "their painted wings." In transferring the expression he overlooked the fact that the wings are not the part of the pheasant to which the epithet "painted" is especially applicable.]

[Footnote 55: Originally thus:

When h.o.a.ry-winter clothes the years in white, The woods and fields to pleasing toils invite.--POPE.]

[Footnote 56: The reflection is misplaced; for dogs by nature chase hares, and man avails himself of their instinctive propensities.]

[Footnote 57: Originally:

O'er rustling leaves around the naked groves.--WARBURTON.

This is a better line.--WARTON.]

[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.

The last expression is n.o.bly descriptive.]

[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 circ.u.mstances, 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.]