And dwells such rage in softest bosoms then,
And lodge such daring souls in little men?—Pope.
The second line of the rejected reading was from Addison's translation of the fourth Georgic:
Their little bodies lodge a mighty soul.
Pope probably altered the couplet in consequence of an objection of the author of the Supplement to the Profound, who remarked upon the mean effect which resulted from throwing the rhyme upon "then;" "for the rhyme," says Dr. Trapp, "draws out the sound of little and ignoble words, and makes them observed."
[373] By timorous I understand feeble, from the medium through which it passed.—Wakefield.
[374] Verse 13, &c., stood thus in the first edition:
Sol through white curtains did his beams display,
And ope'd those eyes which brighter shine than they:
Shock just had giv'n himself the rousing shake,
And nymphs prepared their chocolate to take;
Thrice the wrought slipper knocked against the ground,
And striking watches the tenth hour resound.—Pope.
[375] Belinda rung a hand-bell, which not being answered, she knocked with her slipper. Bell-hanging was not introduced into our domestic apartments till long after the date of the Rape of the Lock. There are no bells at Hampton Court, nor were there any in the first quarter of the present century at Chatsworth and Holkham. [ I myself, about the year 1790], remember that it was still the practice for ladies to summon their attendants to their bedchambers by knocking with a high-heeled shoe. Servants, too, were accustomed to wait in ante-rooms, whence they were summoned by hand-bells, and this explains the extraordinary number of such rooms in the houses of the last century.—Croker.
[376] All the verses from hence to the end of this canto were added afterwards.—Pope.
And, as Mr. Croker observes, Pope, in adding them, did not perceive that he introduced an inconsistency. At ver. 14 Belinda is represented as waking, and at ver. 20 we have her still sleeping.