Stare adeo miserum est, pereunt vestigia mille
Ante fugam, absentemque ferit gravis ungula campum.
These lines Mr. Dryden, in his preface to his translation of Fresnoy's Art of Painting, calls wonderfully fine, and says "they would cost him an hour, if he had the leisure, to translate them, there is so much of beauty in the original," which was the reason, I suppose, why Mr. Pope tried his strength with them.—Warburton.
[69] "Threatening" is an inappropriate epithet for the sloping hills up which the hunters rode in the neighbourhood of Windsor.
[70] Instead of this couplet, Pope had written in his early manuscript,
They stretch, they sweat, they glow, they shout around;
Heav'n trembles, roar the mountains, thunders all the ground.
He was betrayed into this bombast, which his better taste rejected, by the attempt to carry on the hyperbolical strain of Statius.
[71] Queen Anne.—Warburton.
Congreve's Prologue to the Queen:
For never was in Rome nor Athens seen
So fair a circle, and so bright a queen.
[72] This use of the word "reign" for the territory ruled over, instead of for the sway of the ruler, was always uncommon, and is now obsolete. Queen Anne is mentioned in connection with the chase and the "immortal huntress," because her favourite diversion before she grew unwieldy and inactive, was to follow the hounds in her chaise.