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John Milton
"A certain "C-T-O" contributed "some Papers of Miscellaneous Observations" to the January 1787 EM (pp. 23-5), concluding with "Milton has a singular usage of the word bow'd. See Comus, 1015. Where the bow'd welkin slow doth tend. The same word applied to the same element occurs in the forgotten poetry of Henry More, edit. 1647. p. 305.
Nor can their careful ghosts from Limbo lake
Return, or listen from the bowed skie,
To hear how well their learned lines do take.
Cupid's Conflict."
"R," writing in April 1805 (p. 278), claimed to have discovered the source
of the description of the serpent in Paradise Lost, IX.
510-516
in Nicander's Theriaca, an account of poisonous snakes, lines
266-271 of which he quotes. "R" justified his claim by noting of the snakes
in both passages that their "movements are compared to those of a ship;
rolling from side to side, as sudden gusts impel it; and marking by its keel
the sinuosity of its track." Neither this nor the note on Comus
is included in the Longman's Milton (1968).
Return, or listen from the bowed skie,
To hear how well their learned lines do take.
Cupid's Conflict."
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