[68] The diction of this line is coarse, and the construction defective.—Wakefield.
The omission of "them" after "call" exceeds the bounds of poetic licence.
[69] Equivocal generation is the production of animals without parents. Many of the creatures on the Nile were supposed to be of this class, and it was believed that they were fashioned by the action of the sun upon the slime. The notion was purely fanciful, as was the idea that the insects were half-formed—a compound of mud and organisation.
[70] Dryden's Persius, v. 36:
For this a hundred voices I desire
To tell thee what an hundred tongues would tire.
"I have often thought," says the author of the Supplement to the Profound, speaking of Pope's couplet, "that one pert fellow's tongue might tire a hundred pair of attending ears; but I never conceived that it could communicate any lassitude to the tongues of the bystanders before." The evident meaning of Pope is that it would tire a hundred ordinary tongues to talk as much as one vain wit, but the construction is faulty.
[71] This is a palpable imitation of Horace's Art of Poetry, 38:
Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, æquam
Viribus; et versate diu, quid ferre recusent,
Quid valeant humeri.—Wakefield.
[72] Pope is unfortunate in his selection of instances to illustrate his position that the various mental faculties are never concentrated in the same individual. Men of great intellect have sometimes bad memories, and a good memory is sometimes found in persons of a feeble intellect; but it is a monstrous paradox to assert that a retentive memory and a powerful understanding cannot go together. No one will deny that Dr. Johnson and Lord Macaulay were gifted with vigorous, brilliant minds; yet the memory of the first was extraordinary, and that of the second prodigious. In general, men of transcendent abilities have been remarkable for their knowledge.
[73] Dryden, in his Character of a Good Parson: