In his poem "Darkness", Lord Byron writes:
[...]
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
[...]
Is Byron employing 'city' in a sense similar to 'scope' or 'size' in this instance?
“City” has its usual meaning, “a large or important municipality” (OED). The tricky word here is “but”, which Byron uses in the sense “nothing but, no more than, only, merely” (OED). So the lines mean that, out of the original population of the enormous city, only two people were left alive: the rest had “famished by degrees” (that is, died of starvation one by one).
