of Wycherley, improved by Pope.]

[Footnote 5: If Wycherley had been capable of anything of the kind,
this, and the previous couplet, might have been written after the Essay
on Criticism, but surely could not have been inspired by a perusal of
the manuscript of the Pastorals.--CROKER.]

[Footnote 6: This line was omitted by Pope in 1736.]

[Footnote 7: From Boileau's Art of Poetry, Chant ii. v. 1.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 8: This triplet was omitted by Pope in the edition of 1736.]

[Footnote 9: Francis Knapp, of Chilton, in Berkshire, Gent. He was of
St. John's College, Oxford, and afterwards demy of Magdalen
College.--CUNNINGHAM.

He graduated M.A. April 30, 1695, and as he could hardly have been an
M.A. before he was twenty-five, he would have been forty-five at the
date of these verses. There is a rhyming "Epistle to Mr. B----, by Mr.
Fr. Knapp, of Magdalen College, in Oxford," in Tonson's Fourth
Miscellany.--CROKER.

He died in, or before 1727; for in one of Lintot's advertisements of
that year he is described as the "_late_ Rev. Mr. Francis Knapp, Dean of
Killala."]

[Footnote 10: There are several lines in this copy of verses, which
could not be endured in a common magazine. So much is the public ear,
and public taste improved.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 11: The next six lines were left out by Pope in 1736.]

[Footnote 12: Hough was chosen president of Magdalen College in April,
1687, in defiance of the mandate sent by James II. to the fellows,
requiring them to elect Farmer, a profligate and a papist. The illegal
proceedings of the king in dispossessing the protestants, and filling
the college with romanists, alarmed and enraged the country, and
contributed largely to the Revolution of 1688. In May, 1690, Hough
became Bishop of Oxford. He was translated to Lichfield and Coventry in
1699, and to Worcester in 1717, where he remained till his death in May,
1743, at the age of ninety-three.]

[Footnote 13: By far the most elegant, and best turned compliment of all
addressed to our author, happily borrowed from a fine Greek epigram, and
most gracefully applied.--WARTON.

There is little merit in borrowing a compliment from the Anthology, and
the felicity of its application in the present instance may be
questioned, notwithstanding the emphatic praise of Warton. The
mythological basis of the lines, which is appropriate in the Greek,
becomes childish when adopted by an English poet, and the point of the
piece, whi