that occasion.--WARTON.

The entire story was probably a legend.]

[Footnote 33: These two lines have been quoted as the most smooth and
mellifluous in our language; and they are supposed to derive their
sweetness and harmony from the mixture of so many iambics. Pope himself
preferred the following line to all he had written, with respect to
harmony:

Lo, where Maeotis sleeps, and hardly flows.--WARTON.

Dryden in his Annus Mirabilis:

A constant trade-wind will securely blow,
And gently lay us on the spicy shore.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 34: In the MS.:

To those steep cliffs, that ocean must I fly.]

[Footnote 35: In the place of this couplet, there were four lines in the
MS.:

If thou return thy Sappho too shall stay,
Not all the gods shall force me then away;
Nor Love, nor Phoebus, then invoked shall be,
For thou alone art all the gods to me.

Another version ran thus:

Wouldst thou return, oh more than Phoebus, fair
No god like thee could ease thy Sappho's care.]

[Footnote 36: "Liked" seems a very unsuitable expression in the present
day. It was a word, however, among our early writers of greater force
and significance:

What I that loved, and you that _liked_,
Shall we begin to wrangle?
No, no, no; my heart is fixed,
And cannot disentangle.

_Old Ballad._--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 37: In the MS.:

Phaon--_my_ Phaon I almost had said--
Is fled, with Phaon your delights are fled.

Cromwell wrote against the last line "recte, non pulchre," and Pope
tried three variations of it before he cast them aside for the version
in the text:

Is gone, and with him all your pleasures fled.
Is gone, and all that's pleasing with him fled.
Is gone, and with him your delights are fled.]

[Footnote 38: Of ver. 242 and v. 244, Pope says in the MS., "So at first
as printed, but objected [against] as tautological. _Sic recte_ as [in
the] margin, but carried afterwards as at first." "Sighs" was thought to
be too nearly synonymous with "prayers," and Pope altered the lines by
erasing the expressions "no sighs" and "my sighs," and affixing the
epithet "tender" in both verses to numbers.]

[Footnote 39: In the MS.:

Oh, when shall kinder, more auspicious gales,
Waft to these eyes thy long-expected sails.

"Pleonasm," says a note on the manuscript. "_Kinder_, and _more
auspicious_, too much."]

[Footnote 40: This image