e crimes and passions of which it had been
the scene. The haste with which she goes, and her preference for the
terrestrial journey, even over the haunts of her own Tartarus, indicate
the signal malevolence of the mission. Hence the delight she takes in
it.]

[Footnote 36: The original is more forcible and less extravagant. The
sunken eyes of the Fury glared with a light like that of red-hot
iron--_ferrea lux_.]

[Footnote 37: This expression, which is not in Statius, is common with
Dryden, as in his Virg. AEn. x. 582:

And from Strymonius hewed his better hand.]

[Footnote 38: Statius depicts the frenzied virulence of the Fury, by
saying that she lashed the air with the serpent. Pope has marred the
description by representing the lashing of the air as the act of the
serpent itself.]

[Footnote 39: After Ino had drowned herself and her son Melicertes, they
became marine divinities, and their names were changed to Leucothea and
Palaemon. Statius is more picturesque than Pope. When the apparition of
the Fury announced terrible evils to come, the sea was stirred to its
depths. On the outburst of the tempest, Palaemon was sailing about on the
back of a dolphin, and it was then that his mother snatched him up in
her alarm, and pressed him to her bosom. To convey an idea of the
tremendous nature of the storm, Statius says that the Corinthian isthmus
could hardly resist the violence of the waves which dashed against each
of its shores. This circumstance is justly styled by Pope "most
extravagantly hyperbolical," but a translator should not have omitted
it.]

[Footnote 40: A great image, and highly improved from the original,
"assueta nube."--WARTON.

The first edition had a feeble prosaic line in place of the image which
Warton admired:

Headlong from thence the fury urged her flight,
And at the Theban palace did alight.]

[Footnote 41: "Ruptaeque vices" in the original, which Pope translates,
"and all the ties of nature broke," but by _vices_ is indicated the
alternate reign of the two brothers, as ratified by mutual oaths, and
subsequently violated by Eteocles.--DE QUINCEY.]

[Footnote 42: The felicities of this translation are at times perfectly
astonishing, and it would be scarcely possible to express more nervously
or amply the words,--

jurisque secundi
Ambitus impatiens, et summo dulcius unum
Stare loco,--

than by Pope's couplet, which most judiciously, by r