[!--Line Note 308--] [Line 308: On content.—On trust, a common use of the word in Pope's time.]
[!--Line Note 311--] [Lines 311, 312: Prismatic glass.—A glass prism by which light is refracted, and the component rays, which are of different colors being refracted at different angles show what is called a spectrum or series of colored bars, in the order violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red.]
[!--Line Note 328--] [Line 328: Fungoso—One of the characters in Ben Jonson's Every Man out of his Humor who assumed the dress and tried to pass himself off for another.]
[!--Line Note 356--] [Line 356: Alexandrine—A line of twelve syllables, so called from a French poem on the Life of Alexander the Great, written in that meter. The poet gives a remarkable example in the next line.]
[!--Line Note 361--] [Line 361: Sir John Denham, a poet of the time of Charles I. (1615-1668). His verse is characterized by considerable smoothness and ingenuity of rhythm, with here and there a passage of some force—Edmund Waller (1606-1687) is celebrated as one of the refiners of English poetry. His rank among English poets, however, is very subordinate.]
[!--Line Note 366--] [Line 366: Zephyr.—Zephyrus, the west wind personified by the poets and made the most mild and gentle of the sylvan deities.]
[Lines 366-373: In this passage the poet obviously intended to make "the sound seem an echo to the sense". The success of the attempt has not been very complete except in the second two lines, expressing the dash and roar of the waves, and in the last two, expressing the skimming, continuous motion of Camilla. What he refers to is the onomatopoeia of Homer and Virgil in the passages alluded to. Ajax, the son of Telamon, was, next to Achilles, the bravest of all the Greeks in the Trojan war. When the Greeks were challenged by Hector he was chosen their champion and it was in their encounter that he seized a huge stone and hurled it at Hector.
Thus rendered by Pope himself:
"Then Ajax seized the fragment of a rock
Applied each nerve, and swinging round on high,
With force tempestuous let the ruin fly
The huge stone thundering through his buckler broke."
Camilla, queen of the Volsci, was brought up in the woods, and, according to Virgil, was swifter than the winds. She led an army to assist Turnus against Aeneas.