"... Heigh ho! I feel (as you to be sure have done long since) that I have very little to say, at least in prose. Somebody will be the better for it; I do not mean you, but your Cat, feuë Mademoiselle Selime, whom I am about to immortalize for one week or fortnight, as follows: [the Ode follows, which we need not reprint here].
"There's a poem for you, it is rather too long for an Epitaph."
[2.] Cf. Lady M. W. Montagu, Town Eclogues:
| "Where the tall jar erects its stately pride, With antic shapes in China's azure dyed." |
[3.] The azure flowers that blow. Johnson and Wakefield find fault with this as redundant, but it is no more so than poetic usage allows. In the Progress of Poesy, i. 1, we have again: "The laughing flowers that round them blow." Cf. Comus, 992:
| "Iris there with humid bow Waters the odorous banks that blow Flowers of more mingled hue Than her purfled scarf can shew." |
[4.] Tabby. For the derivation of this word from the French tabis, a kind of silk, see Wb. In the first ed. the 5th line preceded the 4th.
[6.] The lake. In the mock-heroic vein that runs through the whole poem.