give a shade
To savage beasts who on the weaker prey,
Or human savages more wild than they.
Wakefield remarks that there is an inaccuracy in Pope's couplet, since
the "savage laws" to which the pronoun "they" in part refers, were the
mode in which the severity of the king displayed itself.]
[Footnote 20: The representation is erroneous. The "air, floods, and
wilds" were not "dispeopled." The forest laws occasioned an increase in
the quantity of game, which was preserved more carefully when it became
the property of the privileged few, and was no longer liable to be
exterminated by the many. Pope is not consistent with himself, for he
afterwards complains that "while the subject starved the _beast_ was
_fed_."]
[Footnote 21: Originally thus in the MS.:
From towns laid waste, to dens and caves they ran
(For who first stooped to be a slave was man).--WARBURTON.
The conceit is childish, because dens and caves are the residence of
these brutes at all times, and therefore their retreat to these places
constitutes no argument of their aversion to slavery. And the following
couplet is by no means worthy of the poet.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 22: According to this doctrine no nation can lie free in which
lawless beasts are subjugated by man.]
[Footnote 23: Pope puts "the elements" for the creatures which inhabited
them.]
[Footnote 24: In the first edition it was,
The swain with tears to beasts his labour yields,
which defined the poet's idea more clearly. He changed the expression to
avoid the recurrence of the same word when he introduced "beast" into
the next couplet.]
[Footnote 25: Addison's Letter from Italy:
The poor inhabitant beholds in vain
The reddening orange, and the swelling grain:
Joyless he sees the growing oils and wines,
And in the myrtle's fragrant shade repines:
Starves, in the midst of nature's bounty curst,
And in the loaden vineyard dies for thirst.--HOLT WHITE.
This passage, which describes the misery entailed upon the Italian
peasants by an oppressive government, plainly suggested the lines of
Pope. The death from thirst, which Addison adds to the death from
starvation, is too great an exaggeration. Water could always be had.]
[Footnote 26:
No wonder savages or subjects slain--
But subjects starved, while savages were fed.
It was originally thus, but the word "savages" is not properly applied
to beasts, but to men; which occasioned the alteration.--POPE.]
[Footnote 27: Translated from
Templa adimit divis, fora civibus, arva colonis,
an old monkish writer, I forget who.--POPE.]
[Footnote 28: Alluding to the destruction made in the New Forest, and
the tyrannies exercised there by William I.--POPE.
I have the authority of three or four of our best antiquarians to say,
that the common tradition of villages and parishes, within the compass
of thirty miles, being destroyed, in the New Forest, is absolutely
groundless, no traces or vestiges of such being to be discovered, nor
any other parish named in Doomsday Book, but what now remains.--WARTON.
The argument from Doomsday Book is of no weight if, as Lingard asserts,
the New Forest was formed before the registration took place. William
was an eager sportsman. "He loved the beasts of chase," says the Saxon
chronicle, "as if he had been their father," and the source of his love
was the pleasure he took in killing them. His hunting grounds, however,
were ample without the New Forest, and Thierry thinks that his motive in
forming it may have been political. The wooded district, denuded of a
hostile population, and stretching to the sea, would have afforded
shelter to the Normans in the event of a reverse, and enabled them to
disembark in safety.]
[Footnote 29: Addison's Campaign:
O'er prostrate towns and palaces they pass,
Now covered o'er with weeds, and hid in grass.]
[Footnote 30: Donne, in his second Satire,