[7] From Boileau's Art of Poetry, Chant ii. v. 1.—Warton.
[8] This triplet was omitted by Pope in the edition of 1736.
[9] Francis Knapp, of Chilton, in Berkshire, Gent. He was of St. John's College, Oxford, and afterwards demy of Magdalen College.—Cunningham.
He graduated M.A. April 30, 1695, and as he could hardly have been an M.A. before he was twenty-five, he would have been forty-five at the date of these verses. There is a rhyming "Epistle to Mr. B——, by Mr. Fr. Knapp, of Magdalen College, in Oxford," in Tonson's Fourth Miscellany.—Croker.
He died in, or before 1727; for in one of Lintot's advertisements of that year he is described as the "late Rev. Mr. Francis Knapp, Dean of Killala."
[10] There are several lines in this copy of verses, which could not be endured in a common magazine. So much is the public ear, and public taste improved.—Warton.
[11] The next six lines were left out by Pope in 1736.
[12] Hough was chosen president of Magdalen College in April, 1687, in defiance of the mandate sent by James II. to the fellows, requiring them to elect Farmer, a profligate and a papist. The illegal proceedings of the king in dispossessing the protestants, and filling the college with romanists, alarmed and enraged the country, and contributed largely to the Revolution of 1688. In May, 1690, Hough became Bishop of Oxford. He was translated to Lichfield and Coventry in 1699, and to Worcester in 1717, where he remained till his death in May, 1743, at the age of ninety-three.
[13] By far the most elegant, and best turned compliment of all addressed to our author, happily borrowed from a fine Greek epigram, and most gracefully applied.—Warton.
There is little merit in borrowing a compliment from the Anthology, and the felicity of its application in the present instance may be questioned, notwithstanding the emphatic praise of Warton. The mythological basis of the lines, which is appropriate in the Greek, becomes childish when adopted by an English poet, and the point of the piece, which turns upon the assumption that Pope's translation was vastly superior to the original, is too extravagant to be pleasing. Fenton was a scholar, and could not have thought what he said.