Pleased in the general's sight, the host lie down
Sudden before some unsuspecting town;
The young, the old, one instant make our prize,
And o'er their captive heads Britannia's standard flies.—Warburton.
Pope, as Wakefield observes, has joined together in the simile in the text the inconsistent notions of a town surprised, and a town taken by the regular approaches of a siege. "The passage," adds Wakefield, "as it originally stood was free from this heterogeneous intermixture, and by a little polish might have been made superior to the present reading."
[52] Richardson gives a more descriptive line from the manuscript:
Exults in air and plies his whistling wings.
The poet doubtless substituted the later version, because the expression "whirring pheasant" conveyed the same idea as "whistling wings."
[53] This fine apostrophe was probably suggested by that of Virgil on the ox dying of the plague:
Now what avails his well-deserving toil. Dryden.—Wakefield.
[54] Steevens quotes Pictæque volucres. Virg. Painted birds. Dryden.—Bowles.
Pope probably took the phrase from Paradise Lost, where the birds are described as spreading "their painted wings." In transferring the expression he overlooked the fact that the wings are not the part of the pheasant to which the epithet "painted" is especially applicable.
[55] Originally thus: