ks," and
"crowned," and set a mark against the line, as if he had detected, and
intended to remove, the defect.]

[Footnote 17: Dryden's Translations from Ovid:

A dismal desert, and a silent waste.

Pope weakened the line in varying it. "Dreary desert" and "gloomy waste"
are synonymous, but "silent" adds a distinct idea to "dismal."]

[Footnote 18: The Forest Laws.--POPE.

The killing a deer, boar, or hare, was punished with the loss of the
delinquent's eyes.--WARTON.

Thierry believes that the forest laws had a more serious object than to
secure for the king a monopoly of sport. The chief intention was to keep
the newly conquered Saxons from going armed under the pretext that they
were in pursuit of game. Hence the penalty was of a nature to
incapacitate the offender for military service.]

[Footnote 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.]

[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 edi