Note 382 — RAPE OF THE LOCK.
Reading edition
Dryden, Æn. i. 196:
The realms of ocean and the fields of air.—Wakefield.
In Le Comte de Gabalis the salamanders who dwelt in fire, the nymphs who peopled the seas and rivers, the gnomes who filled the earth almost to the centre, and the sylphs who in countless multitudes floated in the air, are said to be formed of the purest portion of the elements they respectively inhabit. But their moral and mental natures are not, as in the Rape of the Lock, the counter-part of their corporeal qualities, and they are a race of beings distinct from man, and not deceased mortals, as with Pope, who was indebted for this circumstance to the account of the fairy train in Dryden's Flower and Leaf:
And all those airy shapes you now behold Were human bodies once, and clothed with earthly mould.