e.

Fenton in his pastoral on the Marquis of Blandford's death:

And, swoln with tears, to floods the riv'lets ride.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 36: Let grief or love have the power to animate the winds, the
trees, the floods, provided the figure be dispatched in a single
expression, but when this figure is deliberately spread out with great
accuracy through many lines, the reader, instead of relishing it, is
struck with its ridiculous appearance.--LORD KAMES.

All this is very poor, and unworthy Pope. First the breeze whispers the
death of Daphne to the trees; then the trees inform the flood of it;
then the flood o'erflows with tears; and then they all deplore together.
The whole pastoral would have been much more classical, correct, and
pure, if these lines had been omitted. Let us, however, still remember
the youth of Pope, and the example of prior poets.--BOWLES.

Moschus in his third Idyll calls upon the nightingales to tell the river
Arethusa that Bion is dead. Oldham in his imitation of Moschus
exaggerated his original and commanded the nightingales to tell the news
"to _all_ the British floods,"--to see that it was "conveyed to Isis,
Cam, Thames, Humber, and utmost Tweed," and these in turn were to be
ordered "to waft the bitter tidings on." Pope went further than Oldham,
and describes one class of inanimate objects as conveying the
intelligence to another class of inanimate objects till the whole
uttered lamentations in chorus. Each succeeding copyist endeavoured to
eclipse his predecessor by going beyond him in absurdity. Most of the
ideas adopted by Pope in his Winter had been employed by scores of
elegiac bards. "The numerous pastorals upon the death of princes or
friends," says Dr. Trapp, "are cast in the same mould; read one, you
read all. Birds, sheep, woods, mountains, rivers, are full of
complaints. Everything in short is wondrous miserable."]

[Footnote 37: Virg. Ecl. v. 56:

miratur limen Olympi,
Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis.--POPE.

Dryden thus renders the passage in Virgil:

Daphnis, the guest of heav'n, with wond'ring eyes
Views in the milky way the starry skies.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 38: In Spenser's November, and in Milton's Lycidas, there is
the same beautiful change of circumstances.--WARTON.

It was one of the stereotyped common-places of elegiac poems, and was
ridiculed in No. 30 of the Guardian. The writer might almost be thought
to