[463] "Wait" for "wait on" or "by" is a very harsh ellipse, though it has the sanction of Dryden.
[464] Hypochondriacal disorders, under the name of vapours or spleen, were then the fashionable complaint, and as they often presented no definite bodily symptoms they could be readily feigned. The "gown" and "night-dress" of Pope are the "dressing-gown" of our day.
[465] Oldham had expressed the same idea in The Dream:
Not dying saints enjoy such ecstacies
When they in visions antedate their bliss.
The ancients believed the spleen to be the seat of mirth, and hence a disordered spleen was supposed to produce melancholy and moroseness. The second sense, in modern usage, has driven out the first, and spleen has become synonymous with surliness and gloom, but Pope in prose as well as verse gave it a wider range, and appears to ascribe to it those creations of the imagination which are mistaken for realities. "Methinks," he writes to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "I am imitating in my ravings the dreams of splenetic enthusiasts and solitaires, who fall in love with saints and fancy themselves in favour of angels and spirits."
[466] Snakes erect on the "rolling spires," or coils of their bodies, as Milton says that the neck of the serpent was "erect amidst his circling spires."
[467] In the last century the word "machine" was currently employed to designate the supernatural agents in a fiction, and their proceedings when acting in human affairs. Thus, by the expression "angels in machines" is meant angels interposing on behalf of mankind.
[468] Ovid, Met. i. 1:
In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas Corpora.
Of bodies changed to various forms I sing.—Dryden's Trans.—Wakefield.