ltu," is the common
reading. I believe it should be "nutu," with reference to the word
"quatiens."--POPE.]

[Footnote 55: Pope was manifestly unable to extract any sense from the
original. It is there said that Jupiter at his first entrance seats
himself upon his starry throne, but that the other gods did not presume
to sit down "protinus," that is, in immediate succession to Jupiter, and
interpreting his example as a tacit license to do so, until, by a gentle
wave of his hand, the supreme father signifies his express permission to
take their seats. In Pope's translation, the whole picturesque solemnity
of the celestial ritual melts into the vaguest generalities.--DE
QUINCEY.

De Quincey was mistaken in his inference that Pope was unable to
understand the passage, for he had the assistance of the translation of
Stephens, which gives the meaning correctly:

Anon
He sets him down on his bespangled throne.
The rest stand and expect: not one presumed
To sit till leave was beckoned.]

[Footnote 56: The winds would have been inconvenient members of a
deliberative assembly if they had taken to howling, whistling, and
sighing. Nevertheless their propensity to blow was so inveterate that,
in Statius, they are only kept quiet by their fear of Jove.]

[Footnote 57: Our author is perpetually grasping at the wonderful and
the vast, but most frequently falls gradually from the terrible to the
contemptible.--WARTON.

By "our author" Warton meant Statius, and the expression, he criticised
as hyberbolical was the "eluded rage of Jove,"--an exaggeration for
which Pope alone was responsible.]

[Footnote 58: Hiera, one of the AEolian islands in the neighbourhood of
Sicily, was supposed to be the workshop of Vulcan. The island was
volcanic, and the underground noises were ascribed to Vulcan, and his
assistants, the Cyclopes, as they plied their trade. The circumstance
that the fires of the AEolian forge were exhausted was doubtless
introduced by Statius because in his day the eruptions had ceased in
Hiera.]

[Footnote 59: Agave, the daughter of Cadmus. Her son Pentheus appeared
among the women who were celebrating the Bacchic revelries on Mount
Cithaeron, and his mother, mistaking him in her frenzy for a wild beast,
like a wild beast tore him to pieces.]

[Footnote 60: There is no mention of "the direful banquet" in the
original. "The savage hunter" alludes to Athamas chasing and slay