Note 23 — SPRING:
Reading edition
In the manuscript this verse ran
There the pale primrose and the vi'let glow,
which was evidently borrowed from a line in Dryden's Cock and Fox, quoted by Wakefield:
How the pale primrose and the vi'let spring.
The first edition of the Pastorals had
Here on green banks the blushing vi'lets glow,
and this reading was retained till the edition of Warburton. It probably at last occurred to the poet that as people do not blush blue or purple, the epithet "blushing" was inapplicable to the violet.