"Tube" is an affected term for a gun, but the word is adopted by Cowper and Campbell. Thomson, in his lines on partridge-shooting, was not afraid to call the gun by its own name, and yet is more poetical than Cowper, Campbell, or Pope:
the gun
Glanced just and sudden from the fowler's eye,
O'ertakes their sounding pinions.
The last expression is nobly descriptive.
Præcipites altá vitam sub nube relinquunt. Virg.—Warburton.
So before Pope, Philips in his Cider:
——they leave their little lives above the clouds.—Steevens.
[61] It is singular, that in a poem on a forest, the majestic oak, the deer, and many other interesting and characteristic circumstances, should be all thrown in the distant ground, whilst objects much less appropriate, the fisher, the fowler, &c. are brought forward.—Bowles.
[62] The active use of the word hope, though authorised by Dryden, appears to my taste intolerably harsh and affected.—Wakefield.
[63] "Volume," except in its application to books, now carries with it an idea of magnitude. In Pope's day it was still used in its strictly etymological sense. When Milton, in his personification of Sin (Par. Lost, ii. 651), says that she