amed for beauty both.
Wakefield points out that the opening verse of the couplet, as it stands
in the text, was indebted to Congreve's Tears of Amaryllis for Amyntas:
When woolly flocks their bleating cries renew,
And from their fleecy sides first shake the silver dew.]
[Footnote 14: The epithet "whitening" most happily describes the
progressive effect of the light.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 15: Dryden's Palamon and Arcite:
Fresh as the month, and as the morning fair.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 16: From Virgil, Ecl. vii. 20:
Hos Corydon, illos referebat in ordine Thyrsis.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 17: Milton's first sonnet:
O! nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray
Warblest at eve!--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 18: Congreve's Tears of Amaryllis for Amyntas:
When grateful birds prepare their thanks to pay,
And warble hymns to hail the dawning day.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 19: Waller's Chloris and Hylas:
Hylas, oh Hylas! why sit we mute
Now that each bird saluteth the spring.--WAKEFIELD.
Concanen having commented in the Supplement to the Profound upon the
impropriety "of making an English clown call a well-known bird by a
classical name," Pope wrote in the margin, "Spenser and Ph." The
remainder of the second name has been cut off by the binder. Pope's
memory deceived him if A. Philips was meant, for the nightingale is not
once called Philomela in his Pastorals.]
[Footnote 20: Phosphor was the Greek name for the planet Venus when she
appeared as a morning star.]
[Footnote 21: Purple is here used in the Latin sense of the brightest,
most vivid colouring in general, not of that specific tint so
called.--WARBURTON.]
[Footnote 22: Dryden in his Cock and Fox:
See, my dear!
How lavish nature has adorned the year.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 23: In the manuscript this verse ran
There the pale primrose and the vi'let glow,
which was evidently borrowed from a line in Dryden's Cock and Fox,
quoted by Wakefield:
How the pale primrose and the vi'let spring.
The first edition of the Pastorals had
Here on green banks the blushing vi'lets glow,
and this reading was retained till the edition of Warburton. It probably
at last occurred to the poet that as people do not blush blue or purple,
the epithet "blushing" was inapplicable to the violet.]
[Footnote 24: "Breathing" means breathing odours, and Wakefield quotes
Paradise Lost
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