[50] The architecture is agreeable to that part of the world.—Pope.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[54] These were the priests and poets of those people, so celebrated for their savage virtue. Those heroic barbarians accounted it a dishonour to die in their beds, and rushed on to certain death in the prospect of an after-life, and for the glory of a song from their bards in praise of their actions.—Pope.
The opinion was general among the Goths that men who died natural deaths went into vast caves underground, all dark and miry, full of noisome creatures, and there for ever grovelled in stench and misery. On the contrary, all who died in battle went to the hall of Odin, their god of war, where they were entertained at infinite tables in perpetual feasts, carousing in bowls made of the skulls of the enemies they had slain.—Sir W. Temple.
It shone lighter than a glass,
And made well more than it was,
To semen every thing, ywis,
As kind of thinge Fames is.—Pope.