Put on that diadem besmeared with gore Which from my father's head these fingers tore.]
[Footnote 28: Dryden's Virg. Æn. iii. 78:
[Footnote 29: Pope uses "preventing" in the then common but now obsolete sense of "anticipating."]
[Footnote 30: A river in the lower world.]
[Footnote 31: Great is the force and the spirit of these lines down to verse 183; and indeed they are a surprising effort in a writer so young as when he translated them. See particularly lines 150 to 160.--WARTON.]
[Footnote 32: The entrance to the infernal regions was said to be through a cave in the Tænarian promontory, which formed the southern extremity of Greece.]
[Footnote 33: Pope has judiciously tamed the bombast image "caligantes animarum examine campos," "the plains darkened with a swarm of ghosts." "Lucentes equos," he translates, "fair glories," omitting the image entirely. To mount Atlas he has added an idea which makes the passage more ridiculous than sublime. It is poorly expressed in the original; in the translation it is ludicrous; "and shook the heavens _and gods he bore_." There are many images which if indistinctly seen are sublime; if particularised they become quite the contrary. However, the translation is certainly wonderful, when the age of the author is considered. It shows his powers of metrical language, at so early a period of his poetical studies, though it is very unfaithful in particular passages.--BOWLES.]
[Footnote 34: Pope's acquaintance with Latin prosody, from his confined education, was probably very small, or he would not have used Mal[=e]a, instead of Mal[)e]a, with the line of Statius before him.--BOWLES.]
[Footnote 35: "Well-known," because the Fury had before visited the Theban palace to instigate the crimes and passions of which it had been the scene. The haste with which she goes, and her preference for the terrestrial journey, even over the haunts of her own Tartarus, indicate the signal malevolence of the mission. Hence the delight she takes in it.]
[Footnote 36: The original is more forcible and less extravagant. The sunken eyes of the Fury glared with a light like that of red-hot iron--_ferrea lux_.]
[Footnote 37: This expression, which is not in Statius, is common with Dryden, as in his Virg. Æn. x. 582: