_peaceful plains_--and that the word _sing_ is
used two lines afterwards, _Sicilian muses sing_." He proposed to read
"try" in the place of "sing;" "happy" instead of "peaceful," and adds,
"Quaere. If _try_ be not properer in relation to _first_, as we first
attempt a thing; and more modest? and if _happy_ be not more than
_peaceful_?" Walsh replies, "_Try_ is better than _sing_. _Happy_ does
not sound right, the first syllable being short. Perhaps you may find a
better word than _peaceful_ as _flow'ry_." Pope rejected all three
epithets, and substituted "blissful."]

[Footnote 4: Evidently imitated from Spenser's Prothalamion:

Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 5: Because Theocritus, the father of Pastoral Poetry, was a
Sicilian.--PROFESSOR MARTYN.]

[Footnote 6: Paradise Regained, ii. 27:

Where winds with reeds and osiers whisp'ring play.

Dryden, Theodore and Honoria:

The winds within the quiv'ring branches played.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 7: Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse:

And Albion's rocks repeat his rural song.--WAKEFIELD.

The term "Albion's cliffs," which is usually appropriated to the steeps
that bound the sea-shore, is applied by Pope to the hills about
Windsor.]

[Footnote 8: The expression in this verse is philosophically just. True
wisdom is the knowledge of ourselves, which terminates in a conviction
of our absolute insignificancy with respect to God, and our relative
inferiority in many instances to the accomplishments of our own species:
and power is encompassed with such a multiplicity of dangerous
temptations as to be almost incompatible with virtue. A passage in
Lucan, viii. 493, is very apposite:

exeat aula
Qui vult esse pius. Virtus et summa potestas
Non coeunt.

He who would spotless live from courts must go:
No union power supreme and virtue know.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 9: Waller, The Maid's Tragedy Altered:

Happy is she that from the world retires,
And carries with her what the world admires.--WILKES.]

[Footnote 10: Sir W. Trumbull was born in Windsor-forest, to which he
retreated after he had resigned the post of secretary of state of King
William III.--POPE.

The address to Trumbull was not in the original manuscript which passed
through his hands, and the lines were probably added when the Pastorals
were prepared for the press. "Little Pope," wrote Sir William