[76]. But not the praise: 'slits' is understood, but it doesn't yoke well with 'praise'; the nearest substitute would be 'cuts off': but cuts not off the praise.
[79]. Nor in: i.e. nor (lies) in, not set off in; 'set off' refers, not to 'Fame,' but to 'glistering foil,' i.e. the bright outside exhibited to the world.
[81]. by: as Keightley explains, by means of, under the influence of; he quotes Habakkuk i. 13: 'Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil.'
[85]. fountain Arethuse: in the island Ortygia, near Syracuse; by metonymy for the 'Sicilian Muse' (v. 133), or the fountain-nymph, Arethusa, presiding over pastoral poetry, which originated in Sicily, and was consummated by Theocritus, a native of Syracuse. Virgil, in the opening of his fourth Eclogue, Pollio, invokes the Sicilian Muses (Sicelides Musæ, paullo majora canamus), and in his tenth Eclogue, Gallus, he invokes the fountain nymph, Arethusa, to aid him in his last pastoral song (Extremum hunc, Arethusa, mihi concede laborem); and thou honoured flood, smooth-sliding Mincius: Mantua, Virgil's birth town, or what he regarded as such (he was born in the neighboring village of Andes), is on an island in the river Mincius, a tributary of the Po; honoured flood . . . crowned with vocal reeds: i.e. by reason of its association with Virgil, and his fame as a pastoral poet. Lord Tennyson, in his ode 'To Virgil, written at the request of the Mantuans for the nineteenth centenary of Virgil's death,' speaks of him as a pastoral poet, in the fourth and fifth stanzas:
'Poet of the happy Tityrus
piping underneath his beechen bowers;
Poet of the poet-satyr
whom the laughing shepherd bound with flowers;
Chanter of the Pollio, glorying
in the blissful years again to be,