Who pale with fear the rending earth survey
And startle at the sudden flash of day.
There is more of bathos than of humour from ver. 43 to ver. 52. The exaggeration is carried so far that even the similitude of caricature is lost.
[504] These four lines added, for the reason before mentioned.—Pope.
[505] Minerva in like manner, during the battle of Ulysses with the suitors in the Odyssey, perches on a beam of the roof to behold it.—Pope.
[506] Like the heroes in Homer when they are spectators of a combat.—Warton.
[507] This idea is borrowed from a couplet in the Duke of Buckingham's Essay on Poetry where he ridicules the poetical dialogues of the dramatis personæ in the reign of Charles II.
Or else like bells, eternally they chime
They sigh in simile, and die in rhyme.
[508] Wakefield quotes passages from Sir Philip Sidney, Drummond, and Milton, in which the phrase "living death" occurs.
[509] The words of a song in the Opera of Camilla.—Pope.
"Here," said Dennis, speaking of the death of the beau and witling, "we have a real combat, and a metaphorical dying," and he did the lines no injustice when he added that they were but a "miserable pleasantry."