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irgil, AEn. vii. 25: That watched the moon and planetary hour.] [Footnote 45: Confucius flourished about two thousand three hundred years ago, just before Pythagoras. He taught justice, obedience to parents, humility, and universal benevolence: and he practised these virtues when he was a first minister, and when he was reduced to poverty and exile.--WARTON.] [Footnote 46: The learning of the old Egyptian priests consisted for the most part in geometry and astronomy: they also preserved the history of their nation. Their greatest hero upon record is Sesostris, whose actions and conquests may be seen at large in Diodorus, &c. He is said to have caused the kings he vanquished to draw him in his chariot. The posture of his statue, in these verses, is correspondent to the description which Herodotus gives of one of them, remaining in his own time.--POPE.] [Footnote 47: The colossal statue of the celebrated Eastern tyrant is not very strongly imagined. The word "hold" is particularly feeble.--WARTON.] [Footnote 48: Virgil's giant Bitias, AEn. ix. 958, has in Dryden's translation, quoted by Wakefield, "a coat of double mail with scales of gold."] [Footnote 49: Two flatter lines upon such a subject cannot well be imagined.--BOWLES.] [Footnote 50: The architecture is agreeable to that part of the world.--POPE.] [Footnote 51: The learning of the northern nations lay more obscure than that of the rest. Zamolxis was the disciple of Pythagoras, who taught the immortality of the soul to the Scythians.--POPE. They worshipped Zamolxis, and thought they should go to him when they died. He was said by the Greeks who dwelt on the shores of the Hellespont, to have been the slave of Pythagoras before he became the instructor of his countrymen, but Herodotus believed that if Zamolxis ever existed, he was long anterior to the Greek philosopher.] [Footnote 52: Odin, or Woden, was the great legislator and hero of the Goths. They tell us of him, that, being subject to fits, he persuaded his followers, that during those trances he received inspirations, from whence he dictated his laws. He is said to have been the inventor of the Runic characters.--POPE.] [Footnote 53: Pope borrowed this idea from the passage he quotes at ver. 179, where Chaucer describes Statius as standing Upon an iron pillar strong That painted was, all endelong, With tigers' blood in every place.] [Footnote 54: These were the p
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