[73] Better in the manuscript:
And rules the boundless empire of the main.
By the alteration Pope increased the compliment to Anne by making her the light of the earth as well as mistress of the forest and the sea. Wakefield thinks that this application to the queen of the offices of Diana as goddess of the woods, the luminary of the night, and the chief agent in the production of the tides, is happily conceived, but the moon and the monarch were "the light of the earth "and "empress of the main" in such different senses, that the line is a trivial play upon words.
[74] In the last edition published in Pope's lifetime, the four previous lines, with the variation of "sunny heaths" for "airy wastes," were printed in a note, and their place in the text was supplied by a single couplet:
Here, as old bards have sung, Diana strayed,
Bathed in the springs, or sought the cooling shade.
Wakefield suggests that Pope rejected this latter line, as not being suited to the prevailing character of the English climate, but at ver. 209 he represents the goddess as often "laving" in the Lodona, and to bathe and luxuriate in shade are surely common enough in England.
[75] Dr. Warton says, "that Johnson seems to have passed too severe a censure on this episode of Lodona; and that a tale in a descriptive poem has a good effect." Johnson does not object to a tale in a descriptive poem. He objects only to the triteness of such a tale as this.—Bowles.
[76] Dryden's Translations from Ovid:
The nicest eye did no distinction know,
But that the goddess bore a golden bow.