Quæ gratia currûm
Armorumque fuit vivis, quæ cura nitentes
Pascere equos, eadem sequitur tellure repostos. Virg. Æneid, vi.—Pope.
To Dryden's version of which passage our poet was indebted:
The love of horses which they had alive,
And care of chariots, after death survive.—Wakefield.
[382] Dryden, Æn. i. 196:
The realms of ocean and the fields of air.—Wakefield.
In Le Comte de Gabalis the salamanders who dwelt in fire, the nymphs who peopled the seas and rivers, the gnomes who filled the earth almost to the centre, and the sylphs who in countless multitudes floated in the air, are said to be formed of the purest portion of the elements they respectively inhabit. But their moral and mental natures are not, as in the Rape of the Lock, the counter-part of their corporeal qualities, and they are a race of beings distinct from man, and not deceased mortals, as with Pope, who was indebted for this circumstance to the account of the fairy train in Dryden's Flower and Leaf:
And all those airy shapes you now behold
Were human bodies once, and clothed with earthly mould.
[383] The idea and the phraseology are both from Paradise Lost, i. 423:
For spirits when they please
Can either sex assume, or both....
... In what shape they choose,
Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure,
Can execute their aery purposes,
And works of love or enmity fulfill.
[384] Parody of Homer.—Warburton.