[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: And from Strymonius hewed his better hand.] [Footnote 38: Statius depicts the frenzied virulence of the Fury, by saying that she lashed the air with the serpent. Pope has marred the description by representing the lashing of the air as the act of the serpent itself.] [Footnote 39: After Ino had drowned herself and her son Melicertes, they became marine divinities, and their names were changed to Leucothea and Palæmon. Statius is more picturesque than Pope. When the apparition of the Fury announced terrible evils to come, the sea was stirred to its depths. On the outburst of the tempest, Palæmon was sailing about on the back of a dolphin, and it was then that his mother snatched him up in her alarm, and pressed him to her bosom. To convey an idea of the tremendous nature of the storm, Statius says that the Corinthian isthmus could hardly resist the violence of the waves which dashed against each of its shores. This circumstance is justly styled by Pope "most extravagantly hyperbolical," but a translator should not have omitted it.] [Footnote 40: A great image, and highly improved from the original, "assueta nube."--WARTON. The first edition had a feeble prosaic line in place of the image which Warton admired: Headlong from thence the fury urged her flight, And at the Theban palace did alight.]