The Works of Alexander Pope Part 69

Wakefield remarks that there is an inaccuracy in Pope's couplet, since the "savage laws" to which the p.r.o.noun "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 quant.i.ty 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 const.i.tutes 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 edition it was,

The swain with tears to beasts his labour yields,

which defined the poet's idea more clearly. He changed the expression to avoid the recurrence of the same word when he introduced "beast" into the next couplet.]

[Footnote 25: Addison's Letter from Italy:

The poor inhabitant beholds in vain The reddening orange, and the swelling grain: Joyless he sees the growing oils and wines, And in the myrtle's fragrant shade repines: Starves, in the midst of nature's bounty curst, And in the loaden vineyard dies for thirst.--HOLT WHITE.

This pa.s.sage, which describes the misery entailed upon the Italian peasants by an oppressive government, plainly suggested the lines of Pope. The death from thirst, which Addison adds to the death from starvation, is too great an exaggeration. Water could always be had.]

[Footnote 26:

No wonder savages or subjects slain-- But subjects starved, while savages were fed.

It was originally thus, but the word "savages" is not properly applied to beasts, but to men; which occasioned the alteration.--POPE.]

[Footnote 27: Translated from

Templa adimit divis, fora civibus, arva colonis,

an old monkish writer, I forget who.--POPE.]

[Footnote 28: Alluding to the destruction made in the New Forest, and the tyrannies exercised there by William I.--POPE.

I have the authority of three or four of our best antiquarians to say, that the common tradition of villages and parishes, within the compa.s.s of thirty miles, being destroyed, in the New Forest, is absolutely groundless, no traces or vestiges of such being to be discovered, nor any other parish named in Doomsday Book, but what now remains.--WARTON.

The argument from Doomsday Book is of no weight if, as Lingard a.s.serts, the New Forest was formed before the registration took place. William was an eager sportsman. "He loved the beasts of chase," says the Saxon chronicle, "as if he had been their father," and the source of his love was the pleasure he took in killing them. His hunting grounds, however, were ample without the New Forest, and Thierry thinks that his motive in forming it may have been political. The wooded district, denuded of a hostile population, and stretching to the sea, would have afforded shelter to the Normans in the event of a reverse, and enabled them to disembark in safety.]

[Footnote 29: Addison's Campaign:

O'er prostrate towns and palaces they pa.s.s, Now covered o'er with weeds, and hid in gra.s.s.]

[Footnote 30: Donne, in his second Satire,

When winds in our ruined abbeys roar.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 31: It is a blemish in this fine pa.s.sage that a couplet in the past tense should be interposed for the sake of the rhyme, in the midst of a description in the present tense.]

[Footnote 32: Originally:

And wolves with howling fill, &c.

The author thought this an error, wolves not being common in England at the time of the Conqueror.--POPE.]

[Footnote 33: "The temples," "broken columns," and "choirs," of the poet, suppose a much statelier architecture than belonged to the rude village churches of the Saxons. With the same exaggeration the hamlets which stood on the site of the New Forest are converted by Pope into "cities," and "towns."]

[Footnote 34: William did not confine his oppression to the weak and succ.u.mb to the strong. The statement that he was "awed by his n.o.bles" is opposed to the contemporary testimony of the Saxon chronicle. "No man,"

says the writer, "durst do anything against his will; he had earls in his bonds who had done against his will, and at last he did not spare his own brother, Odo; him he set in prison." "His rich men moaned," says the chronicler again, "and the poor men murmured, but he was so hard that he recked not the hatred of them all."]

[Footnote 35: The language is too strong. "When his power or interest was concerned," says Lingard, "William listened to no suggestions but those of ambition or avarice, but on other occasions he displayed a strong sense of religion, and a profound respect for its inst.i.tutions."

While resisting ecclesiastical usurpation, and depriving individuals who were disaffected or incompetent, of their preferment, he upheld the church and its dignitaries, and left both in a more exalted position than he found them.]

[Footnote 36: It is incorrect to say that William was denied a grave. As his body was about to be lowered into the vault in the church of St.

Stephen, which he had founded at Caen, a person named Fitz-Arthur forbade the burial, on the plea that the land had been taken by violence from his father, but the prelates having paid him sixty shillings on the spot, and promised him further compensation, the ceremony was allowed to proceed.]

[Footnote 37: "An open s.p.a.ce between woods," is Johnson's definition of "lawn," which is the meaning here, and at ver. 21 and 149. The term has since been appropriated to the dressed green-sward in gardens.]

[Footnote 38: Richard, second son of William the Conqueror.--POPE.

Richard is said by some to have been killed by a stag in the New Forest, by others to have been crushed against a tree by his horse.]

[Footnote 39: This verse is taken from one of Denham's in his translation of the Second aeneis:

At once the taker, and at once the prey.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 40: The oak under which Rufus was shot, was standing till within these few years.--BOWLES.

A stone pillar now marks the spot.--CROKER.]

[Footnote 41: In the New Forest, where the cottages had been swept away by William. "Succeeding monarchs" did not, as Pope implies, suffer encroachments on the forest out of pity for their subjects. The concession was extorted. Some of the provisions of Magna Charta were directed against the increase of the royal forests and against the "evil customs" maintained with respect to them.]

[Footnote 42: Mountains. .h.i.therto unknown to the flocks, who were now for the first time permitted to feed there.]

[Footnote 43:

Miraturque novas frondes et non sua poma. Virg.--WARBURTON.

Virgil is treating of grafts, and says that the parent stock, when the slips grow, wonders at leaves and fruit not its own. Here the imagination keeps pace with the description, but stops short before the notion that the trees in the forest wondered to behold the crops of corn.]

[Footnote 44: He doubtless had in his eye, Vir. aen. i. 506:

Latonae tacitum pertentant gaudia pectus.--WAKEFIELD.