Part 57

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.]

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

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

This is a better line.--WARTON.]

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 nobly descriptive.]

Præcipites altá vitam sub nube relinquunt. Virg.--WARBURTON.

So before Pope, Philips in his Cider:

----they leave their little lives above the clouds.--STEEVENS.

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."]

sporting with quick glance Show to the sun their waved coats dropt with gold.]

"The luce, or pike," says Walton, "is the tyrant of the fresh waters."]

But when bright Phoebus from the twins invites Our active genius to more free delights, With springing day we range the lawns around.--POPE.]

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.]

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.]

Congreve's Prologue to the Queen:

For never was in Rome nor Athens seen So fair a circle, and so bright a queen.]

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.]

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.]