Note 24 — SUMMER:
Reading edition
This is an obvious imitation of those trite lines in Ovid, Met. i. 522:
herbarum subjecta potentia nobis. Hei mihi, quod nullis amor est medicabilis herbis; Nec prosunt domino, quæ prosunt omnibus, artes.—Wakefield.
Dryden's translation:
What herbs and simples grow In fields and forests, all their pow'rs I know. To cure the pains of love no plant avails, And his own physic the physician fails.
It is remarkable that the imitation in the text of some of the most hacknied lines in classical literature, should be one of four passages quoted by Ruffhead, to prove that all the images in Pope's Pastorals had not been borrowed from preceding poets.