ondrous wide
The great God of Love's name--
Tho saw I on a pillere by
Of iron wrought full sternely,
The greate poet Dan Lucan,
That on his shoulders bore up than
As high as that I mighte see,
The fame of Julius and Pompee.
And next him on a pillere stoode
Of sulphur, like as he were woode,
Dan Claudian, sothe for to tell,
That bare up all the fame of hell, &c.--POPE.

Since Homer is placed by Chaucer upon a pillar of iron, he places Virgil
upon iron tinned over, to indicate that the AEneis was based upon the
Iliad and was both more polished and less vigorous. The sulphur upon
which Claudian stands, is typical of the hell he described in his poem
on the Rape of Proserpine. Ovid, the poet of love, is put upon a pillar
of copper, because copper was the metal of Venus; and Lucan, like Homer,
has a pillar of iron allotted to him because he celebrated in his
Pharsalia the wars of Caesar and Pompey, and, as Chaucer says,

Iron Martes metal is,
Which that god is of battaile.]

[Footnote 81: Wakefield supposes that "modest majesty" was suggested by
Milton's phrase, "modest pride," in Par. Lost, iv. 310.]

[Footnote 82: For this expression Wakefield quotes Dryden, AEn. vi. 33.

There too in living sculpture might be seen
The mad affection of the Cretan queen.]

[Footnote 83: The rhyme is dearly purchased by such an inexcusable
inversion as "silver blight."]

[Footnote 84: Pindar being seated in a chariot, alludes to the chariot
races he celebrated in the Grecian games. The swans are emblems of
poetry, their soaring posture intimates the sublimity and activity of
his genius. Neptune presided over the Isthmian, and Jupiter over the
Olympian games.--POPE.]

[Footnote 85: A. Philips, Past. v. 95.

He sinks into the cords with solemn pace,
To give the swelling tones a bolder grace.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 86: "Distorted," which is always used in an unfavourable
sense, is a disparaging epithet by which to characterise the vehement
eagerness of the champions. It is not clear who or what they "threaten,"
whether the horses or each other, and in either case there is nothing
"great" in the image of a person uttering threats in a "distorted
posture."]

[Footnote 87: This expresses the mixed character of the odes of Horace:
the second of these verses alludes to that line of his,

Spiritum Graiae tenuem camoenae,

as another which follows, t