Think'st thou for thee he feeds the wanton fawn
And not as kindly spreads for him the lawn?
Think'st thou for thee the sky-lark mounts and sings?
[1277] Apart from the metre the proper order of the words would be, "loves and raptures of his own swell the note."
[1278] MS.: "gracefully." The reading Pope substituted is not much better, for the generality of men are not absurd enough to ride "pompously."
[1279] This description of the hog as living on the labours of the lord of creation, without ploughing, or obeying his call, gives the idea of some untamed depredator, and not of a domestic animal kept to be eaten. The lord lives on the hog.
[1280] MS.: "Sir Gilbert," which meant Sir Gilbert Heathcote, a rich London alderman, who had been lord mayor. The fur was a part of his official robes.
[1281] MS.:
Know, Nature's children with one care are nursed;
What warms a monarch, warmed an ermine first.
[1282] After ver. 46 in the former editions:
What care to tend, to lodge, to cram, to treat him!
All this he knew; but not that 'twas to eat him,
As far as goose could judge he reasoned right;
But as to man, mistook the matter quite.—Warburton.
Cowley, in his Plagues of Egypt, stanza 1: