Note 1282 — AN ESSAY ON MAN, IN FOUR EPISTLES (continued 3)
Reading edition
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:
All creatures the Creator said were thine: No creature but might since say, "Man is mine."
Gay, Fable 49:
The snail looks round on flow'r and tree, And cries, "All these were made for me."—Wakefield.
The goose is taken from Peter Charron; but such a familiar and burlesque image is improperly introduced among such solid and serious reflections.—Warton.
Pope copied Charron's predecessor, Montaigne, Book ii. Chap. 12: "For why may not a goose say thus, 'The earth serves me to walk upon, the sun to light me. I am the darling of nature. Is it not man that keeps, lodges, and serves me? It is for me that he both sows and grinds.'" "The pampered goose," says Southey, "must have been forgetful of plucking time, as well as ignorant of the rites that are celebrated in all old-fashioned families on St. Michael's Day." The goose's ignorance of his future fate was part of Pope's argument, and he contended that the men who exclaimed, "See all things for my use," were equally blind to the purposes for which they were destined. The illustration is poor both poetically and philosophically.