Note 51 — WINDSOR FOREST.
Reading edition
It stood thus in the first editions:
Pleased in the general's sight, the host lie down Sudden before some unsuspecting town; The young, the old, one instant make our prize, And o'er their captive heads Britannia's standard flies.—Warburton.
Pope, as Wakefield observes, has joined together in the simile in the text the inconsistent notions of a town surprised, and a town taken by the regular approaches of a siege. "The passage," adds Wakefield, "as it originally stood was free from this heterogeneous intermixture, and by a little polish might have been made superior to the present reading."