[96] To gripe thy tumid foot.] Aristotle remarks that, in famished persons, the upper parts of the body are dried up, and the lower extremities become tumid. Scaliger.
[97] Make now your nests.] Grævius finds out that καλιαι may mean huts and barns, as well as nests: and in the true spirit of a verbal commentator, explodes the old interpretation of “facite nidos” and substitutes “exstruite casas:” in which he is followed, like the leader of the flock, by all the modern editors. These viri doctissimi are for ever stumbling on school-boy absurdities in their labour to be critical and sagacious: “they strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.” Are the labourers to set about building huts and barns in the middle of harvest? Who does not see that “make nests,” as old Chapman properly renders it, is a mere proverbial figure? “Make hay while the sun shines.”
[98] Those frosts.] Hesiod is said, in this description, to have imitated Orpheus: as if two poets could not describe the appearances and effects of winter, without copying from each other.
Many and frequent from the clouds of heaven
The frosts rush down, on beeches and all trees,
Mountains and rocks and men: and every face
Is touch’d with sadness. They sore-nipping smite
The beasts among the hills: nor any man
Can leave his dwelling: quell’d in every limb
By galling cold: in all his limbs congeal’d.