[1035] Piety must equally answer with grateful adoration that all these things have been created for the use of man. The error of pride is in the assumption that they have been created for man alone, who is only one out of an infinity of creatures on our globe, as our globe again is only a portion of a larger system. Hence Pope intends us to infer, that it is folly for us to test all things by the consequences to ourselves. The language, however, which he puts into the mouth of pride is extravagant, and "can hardly," says M. Crousaz, "have been ever uttered by any one, unless it were in jest."
[1036] MS.:
For me young nature decks her vernal bow'r,
Suckles each bud, and pencils ev'ry flow'r.
[1037] Garth, Dispensary, i. 175:
His couch a trench, his canopy the skies.—Wakefield.
Pope remembered Isaiah lxvi. 1: "Thus saith the Lord, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool." No sane man could ever pretend that "earth was his footstool," and Pope alone is responsible for the unbecoming misapplication of the prophet's language.
[1038] MS.:
or when oceans
When earth quick swallows, inundations sweep.
[1039] "A nation" in the first edition. The expression is hyperbolical. Pope alludes to such catastrophes as the inundation of Jutland when the sea broke down the dykes in 1634, and fifteen thousand people were drowned. Irruptions on a smaller scale have sometimes been occasioned by the rising of the sea during an earthquake. In that of 1783 the inhabitants of Scilla, in the kingdom of Naples, deserted their city to avoid being crushed by the falling houses, and fled to the shore. A mighty wave, which swept three miles inland, carried back with it 2473 persons, and their prince among the number. Cowper, The Task, ii. 117, has recorded the tragedy in his grandest verse:
Where now the throng
That pressed the beach, and hasty to depart,
Looked to the sea for safety? They are gone,
Gone with the refluent wave into the deep,
A prince with half his people.