Note 70 — AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM.
Reading edition
Dryden's Persius, v. 36:
For this a hundred voices I desire To tell thee what an hundred tongues would tire.
"I have often thought," says the author of the Supplement to the Profound, speaking of Pope's couplet, "that one pert fellow's tongue might tire a hundred pair of attending ears; but I never conceived that it could communicate any lassitude to the tongues of the bystanders before." The evident meaning of Pope is that it would tire a hundred ordinary tongues to talk as much as one vain wit, but the construction is faulty.