[19] This is in imitation of Waller:
Prove all a desert! and none there make stay
But savage beasts, or men as wild as they.—Wakefield.
Sir William Temple says of the forests on the continent that they
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.
[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."
[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.
[22] According to this doctrine no nation can lie free in which lawless beasts are subjugated by man.