eversing the two
clauses, gains the power of fusing them into connection.--DE QUINCEY.]

[Footnote 43: "Bound" is an improper verb as applied to "steers";
besides the simile is not exactly understood. There is nothing about
"reins" or "bounding" in the original. What is meant is that the steers
do not draw even. Pope confounded the image of the young bullocks with
that of a horse, and he therefore introduces "reins" and
"bounding."--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 44: For "armour wait," the first edition had "arms did wait."]

[Footnote 45: "Charger" is used in its old sense of a dish.]

[Footnote 46: Statius, to point the folly of the criminal ambition, goes
on to represent, that the contest was only for naked unadorned dominion
in a poverty-stricken kingdom,--a battle for which should cultivate the
barren territory on the banks of a petty stream,--and for this empty
privilege the brothers sacrificed everything which was of good report in
life or death. Pope weakened the moral of Statius, and the lines which
follow to the end of the paragraph are also very inferior in force to
the original.]

[Footnote 47: In the first edition,

Not all those realms could for such crimes suffice.

Pope might have done more to improve this prosaic couplet.]

[Footnote 48: Pope borrowed from the translation of Stephens:

How wast thou lost
In thine own joys, proud tyrant then, when all
About thee were thy slaves.]

[Footnote 49: It should be "discontented."--WARTON.]

[Footnote 50: This couplet was interpolated by Pope and seems to have
been suggested by his hostility to the revolution of 1688. Nor does
Statius call the populace "vile," or say that they are always
"discontented," or that they are "still prone to change, though still
the slaves of state." Neither does he say that they "are sure to hate
the monarch, they have," but he says that their custom is to love his
successor, which is a sentiment more in accordance with experience.]

[Footnote 51: "Exiled" because the king who was not reigning had to
leave the country during his brother's year of power.]

[Footnote 52: The warriors who were the produce of the dragon's teeth
sown by Cadmus fought among themselves till only five were left.]

[Footnote 53: "Unrivalled," as the context shows, is not here a term of
commendation, but merely signifies that the monarch had no equal in rank
or power.]

[Footnote 54: "Placido quatiens tamen omnia vu