[11.] mend. Improve, make better, amend.
"Mend your speech a little
Lest it may mar your fortunes."
—Shakespeare, King Lear, Act i, sc. i.
[12.] "The gaping of the vowels in this line, the expletive do in the next, and the ten monosyllables in that which follows, give such a beauty to this passage as would have been very much admired in an ancient poet."—Addison.
[13.] Pope himself is not disinclined to make use of these rhymes. See "Essay on Man," 271.
"Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees."
[14.] Referring to the Spenserian stanza which is composed of nine lines, eight of which are iambic pentameters, and the ninth a hexameter or Alexandrine. The name Alexandrine is said to have been derived from an old French poem on Alexander the Great, written about the twelfth or thirteenth century, and composed entirely of hexameter verses. See note on the versification of the "Faerie Queene," page [232].
[15.] Observe the skill with which, both in this line and in several which precede and follow, the poet has made "the sound to seem an echo to the sense."
[16.] Waller had been regarded as the greatest poet of the seventeenth century (see page [205]), and Denham, in the time of Pope, was more esteemed than Milton or Spenser. Dryden called Denham
"That limping old bard
Whose fame on 'The Sophy' and 'Cooper's Hill' stands."