[154] Addison's translation of an extract from Ovid:
While thus she rested on her arm reclined,
The hoary willows waving with the wind.
[155] The river god bowing respectfully to his human audience, before he commenced his speech, is a ludicrous idea, into which Pope was seduced by his courtly desire to represent even the deities as doing homage to Queen Anne.
[156] So Dryden, Æneis, x. 156:
The winds their breath restrain,
And the hushed waves lie flatted on the main.—Wakefield.
Pope's lines are compiled from the passage quoted by Wakefield and a couplet in the Court Prospect of Hopkins:
Unrolling waves steal softly to the shore,
They know their sovereign and they fear to roar.
[157] The Hermus is characterised by Virgil as "turbid with gold." The property was more usually ascribed to its tributary, the Pactolus, but there was no gold in either.
[158] An undoubted imitation, I think, of Dr. Bathurst's verses on Selden:
As when old Nilus, who with bounteous flows
Waters a hundred nations as he goes,
Scattering rich harvests, keeps his sacred head
Amidst the clouds still undiscovered.