Note 19 — WINDSOR FOREST.
Reading edition
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.