ge 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 circumstance 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 passage," 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
manuscript:

Exults in air and plies his whistling wings.

The poet doubtless substituted 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 "pain