Note 59 — WINDSOR FOREST.
Reading edition
The fowler lifts his levelled tube on high.—Pope.
He owed the line in the text to Dryden's Virgil, Geor. ii. 774.
And bends his bow, and levels with his eyes.
"Tube" is an affected term for a gun, but the word is adopted by Cowper and Campbell. Thomson, in his lines on partridge-shooting, was not afraid to call the gun by its own name, and yet is more poetical than Cowper, Campbell, or Pope:
the gun Glanced just and sudden from the fowler's eye, O'ertakes their sounding pinions.
The last expression is nobly descriptive.