ted" is especially applicable.]

[Footnote 55: Originally thus:

When hoary-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 nobly 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
circumstances, 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.]

[Footnote 63: "Volume," except in its application to books, now carries
with it an idea of magnitude. In Pope's day it was still used in its
strictly etymological sense. When Milton, in his personification of Sin
(Par. Lost, ii. 651), says that she

ended foul in many a scaly fold
Voluminous and vast,

"voluminous" is the synonym for "many a scaly fold," and not for the
co