As mercy does. If he had been as you,
And you as he, you would have slipped like him,
But he, like you, would not have been so stern."
"Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once."
As the first 'were' may have been caused by the second, I would, like Warburton, read for it are. In "We cannot cross the cause why we were born" (L. L. L. iv. 3), the folio reads 'are born.'
"If the first that did th' edict infringe."
So it stands in the folio, and Pope was, it may be, right in reading 'If the first man,' but we might also read, and perhaps better, as I have done, 'the edict did.'