[36] "Liked" seems a very unsuitable expression in the present day. It was a word, however, among our early writers of greater force and significance:
What I that loved, and you that liked,
Shall we begin to wrangle?
No, no, no; my heart is fixed,
And cannot disentangle.
Old Ballad.—Bowles.
[37] In the MS.:
Phaon—my Phaon I almost had said—
Is fled, with Phaon your delights are fled.
Cromwell wrote against the last line "recte, non pulchre," and Pope tried three variations of it before he cast them aside for the version in the text:
Is gone, and with him all your pleasures fled.
Is gone, and all that's pleasing with him fled.
Is gone, and with him your delights are fled.
[38] Of ver. 242 and v. 244, Pope says in the MS., "So at first as printed, but objected [against] as tautological. Sic recte as [in the] margin, but carried afterwards as at first." "Sighs" was thought to be too nearly synonymous with "prayers," and Pope altered the lines by erasing the expressions "no sighs" and "my sighs," and affixing the epithet "tender" in both verses to numbers.
[39] In the MS.:
Oh, when shall kinder, more auspicious gales,
Waft to these eyes thy long-expected sails.
"Pleonasm," says a note on the manuscript. "Kinder, and more auspicious, too much."