Chapter XXXV: Appendix (11)

[1342] It is a caution commonly practised amongst navigators, when thrown upon a desert coast, and in want of refreshments, to observe what fruits have been touched by the birds, and to venture on these without further hesitation.--WARBURTON.

[1343] See Pliny's Nat. Hist. Lib. viii. cap. 27, where several instances are given of animals discovering the medicinal efficacy of herbs by their own use of them, and pointing to some operations in the art of healing by their own practice.--WARBURTON.

The instances are all fanciful or fabulous.

[1344] Montaigne, Essays, Book ii. Chap. 12: "Democritus held and proved, that most of the arts we have were taught us by other animals, as by the spider to weave and sew, by the swallow to build, by the swan and nightingale music, and by several animals to make medicines."

[1345] The MS. adds:

Behold the rabbit's fortress in the sands,
The beaver's storied house not made with hands.

A rabbit-burrow has no resemblance to a military fortress, and Pope prudently omitted the incongruous comparison. Martial, Lib. xiii. Ep. 60, had used the illustration in a directly opposite sense, and said that rabbits, by teaching the art of mining, had shown the enemy how fortresses could be taken.

[1346] Oppian, Halicut. Lib. i., describes this fish in the following manner: "They swim on the surface of the sea, on the back of their shells, which exactly resemble the hulk of a ship. They raise two feet like masts, and extend a membrane between, which serves as a sail; the other two feet they employ as oars at the side. They are usually seen in the Mediterranean."---POPE.

The paper-nautilus, or Argonauta Argo, has eight arms. The first pair in the female expand at their extremities, so that each of the two arms terminates in a broad thin membrane. These broad membranes do not exist in the male, and modern naturalists reject the idea that they are used for sails.

[1347] MS.:

There, too, each form of social commerce find,
So late by reason taught to human kind.
Behold th' embodied locust rushing forth
In sabled millions from th' inclement north;
In herds the wolves, invasive robbers, roam,
In flocks, the sheep pacific, race at home.
What warlike discipline the cranes display,
How leagued their squadron, how direct their way.

[1348] The Guardian, No. 157: "Everything is common among ants."

[1349] "Anarchy without confusion" is a contradiction in terms, according to the meaning which is now universally attached to the word anarchy. Pope understands by it the mere absence of all inequality of station.

[1350] The Guardian, No. 157: "Bees have each of them a hole in their hives; their honey is their own; every bee minds her own concerns." The natural history of former times abounded in fables, and among the number was the fancy that each bee had its separate cell, and private store of honey.

[1351] An adaptation of the Latin proverb, mentioned by Cicero, Off. i. 10, and Terence, Heaut. iv. 5, that over-strained law is often unrestrained injustice. The letter contravenes the spirit.

[1352] The imagery of the passage is derived from an observation of a Greek philosopher, who compared laws to spiders' webs,--too fragile to hold fast great offenders, and too strong to suffer trivial culprits to escape.--WAKEFIELD.

Pope upbraids men for enacting laws too strong for the weak instead of following the laws of bees, which are "wise as nature, and as fixed as fate." Such is their superior consideration for the weak that the workers kill the drones when they become burthensome to them, and so far are we behind them in our poor law legislation that we are compelled to maintain the useless members of society,--the old, the crippled, the hopelessly sick, the insane, the idiotic--all of whom, if we would only learn mercy and wisdom of the bee, we should immediately put to death. The doctrine of Pope is altogether childish. The contracted routine of a bee's existence has too little in common with the complicated relations of human life for bee-hive usages to displace the statutes of the realm.

[1353] Till ed. 5:

Who for those arts they learned of brutes before,
As kings shall crown them, or as gods adore.--POPE.

[1354] Roscommon's version of Horace's Art of Poetry:

Cities were built, and useful laws were made.--WAKEFIELD.

[1355] In the MS. thus:

The neighbours leagued to guard their common spot,
And love was nature's dictate, murder not.
For want alone each animal contends;
Tigers with tigers, that removed, are friends.
Plain nature's wants the common mother crowned,
She poured her acorns, herbs, and streams around.
No treasure then for rapine to invade,
What need to fight for sunshine, or for shade?
And half the cause of contest was removed,
When beauty could be kind to all who loved.--WARBURTON.

Of the first couplet there are two other versions in the MS.:

Fear would forbid th' unpractised to engage,
And nature's dictate love, not blood and rage.

Or,

Unpractised man, that knew no murd'ring skill,
And nature's dictate was to love, not kill.

[1356] MS.:

Commerce, convenience, change might strongly draw.

[1357] These two lines added since the first edition.--POPE.

The second line of the couplet had already appeared in the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, ver. 92, in connection with sentiments which leave no doubt of Pope's meaning. In the primitive and golden age he held that love had full liberty to obey its inclinations, or, as he expressed it in the passage of the MS. quoted by Warburton, "beauty could then be kind to all who loved." In other words there was a community of women regulated by no other law than natural impulse.

[1358] MS.:

These states had lords 'tis true, but each its own,
Not all subjected to the rule of one,
Unless where from one lineage all began,
And swelled into a nation from a man.

The nature of the distinction which Pope draws between the lordship over the early states, and kingly rule, is clear from ver. 215, where he says that till monarchy was established patriarchal government prevailed, and each state was only a collection of relations who obeyed the family chief. In a monarchy two or more states were joined together, and the national began to take the place of the family tie. The effect of the change would be great. The social bond between the governor and the governed would be weakened, and the official dignity, the harsh authority, and selfish impulses of the ruler would be quickly increased.

[1359] "Sons," that is, "obeyed a sire" on account of his "virtue," and not on account of his parental authority. Pope had in his mind the remarks of Locke. A mature understanding is necessary for the right direction of the will, and parents must govern the will of the child till he is competent to govern his own. He is then responsible to himself. He owes his parents lasting honour, gratitude, and assistance, but ceases to be under their command, and if, in primitive times, the children, who had arrived at years of discretion, accepted a father for their ruler, his "virtue," says Pope, was the cause.

[1360] Locke, Civil Government, bk. ii. chap. vi. sect. 74: "It is obvious to conceive how easy it was in the first ages of the world for the father of the family to become the prince of it." The right order of Pope's distorted language is that "virtue made the father of a people a prince." He was raised to be a prince because he had manifested a fatherly care for the people.

[1361] Hooker, Eccles. Polity, bk. i. chap. x. sect. 4: "The chiefest person in every household was always as it were a king, and fathers did at the first exercise the office of priests."

[1362] A finer example can perhaps scarce be given of a compact and comprehensive style. The manner in which the four elements were subdued is comprised in these four lines alone. There is not an useless word in this passage. There are but three epithets,--"wond'ring, profound, aerial"--and they are placed precisely with the very substantive that is of most consequence. If there had been epithets joined with the other substantives, it would have weakened the nervousness of the sentence. This was a secret of versification Pope well understood, and hath often practised with peculiar success.--WARTON.

Warton's criticism appears to be wrong throughout. He says the lines describe "the manner in which the four elements were subdued;" but we learn nothing of "the manner" by being told that "fire" was "commanded," and water "controlled." He says "there is not an useless word;" but as either "command" or "control" would apply with equal propriety to both fire and water, the second verb is added solely to eke out the line, and the adjective "profound," when joined to "abyss," is weak tautology for the sake of the rhyme. He says that the epithets "are placed precisely with the very substantive that is of most consequence;" but why is the "fire" less important than the "abyss?" The verses might pass without comment if Warton had not extolled them for imaginary merits. The first line is an example of the sacrifice of truth and picturesqueness to hyperbolical, affected forms of speech. To talk of "calling food from the wond'ring furrow" conveys a false idea of agricultural processes.

[1363] MS.:

He crowned the wond'ring earth with golden grain,
Taught to command the fire, control the main,
Drew from the secret deep the finny drove,
And fetched the soaring eagle from above.

The first couplet is again varied:

He taught the arts of life, the means of food,
To pierce the forest, and to stem the flood.

[1364] MS.:

Till weak, and old, and dying they began.

This couplet is followed in the MS. by a second which Pope omitted:

Saw his shrunk arms, pale cheeks, and faded eye,
Beheld him bend, and droop, and sink, and die.

[1365] Men are said by the poet to have been awakened by the death of the patriarch to reflection upon his original, and to have advanced upwards from father to father, that is, from cause to cause, till their enquiries terminated in one original Father, one first, independent, uncreated cause.--JOHNSON.

At ver. 148 we are told that "the state of nature was the reign of God," and at ver. 156 that "all vocal beings"--man, bird, and beast--joined then in "hymning" their Creator. This condition of things, we learn from ver. 149, dated from the "birth" of nature, which is contrary to Pope's present conjecture that the primitive families may, perhaps, have had no conception of a Deity. The poet's language is irrational. If God did not reveal himself to them in any direct way, they might yet be supposed capable of inferring from their own existence and that of the universe, a truth which their posterity deduced from the death of patriarch after patriarch.

[1366] Pope ought to have written "began." He has improperly put the participle for the past tense. The meaning of the couplet is, that men may possibly have learned from tradition that, "this all," did not exist from eternity, but had a beginning, and therefore a Creator.

[1367] A belief, that is, in the unity of God was the original faith, and polytheism a later corruption.

[1368] Warburton says that the allusion is to the refraction of light in passing through the oblique sides of the glass prism.

[1369] It was before the fall that God pronounced that all was good. But our author never adverts to any lapsed condition of man.--WARTON.

He adverts to it in this passage, where he contrasts primitive virtue with subsequent license.

[1370] This couplet follows in the MS.:

'Twas simple worship in the native grove,
Religion, morals, had no name but love.

[1371] The divine right of kings to their throne, and the unlawfulness of deposing them, however much they might oppress the people for whose benefit they were appointed to rule, was a doctrine first taught in the time of the Stuarts. "It was never heard of among mankind," says Locke writing in 1690, "till it was revealed to us by the divinity of this last age." In opposition to the slavish theory which would subject nations to despots, Pope says that when government was instituted allegiance was the voluntary homage of love.

[1372] Mr. Pope told us that of the number that had read these Epistles, he knew of no one that took the elegance, or even the true meaning of the word "enormous," except Lord Bolingbroke alone. I wonder at it. I am sure I never understood it otherwise than as "out of all rule," and I do not know how anybody could that had read Horace's "abnormis sapiens," and Milton's "enormous bliss." Mr. Pope added for that reason, against his rule of brevity, the two next lines to explain it, and accordingly I since saw them interlined in the original MS.--RICHARDSON.

Milton's "enormous bliss" was bliss "wild, above rule or art." The persons who misunderstood the epithet in Pope's poem must have been those who read the MS.; for the explanatory couplet appeared in the first edition of the Epistle. He obviously meant by "enormous faith" that the faith was an enormity, and it is difficult to conjecture what other sense could be attached to his phrase.

[1373] The "cause" here signifies the purpose or motive manifested in the constitution of the world, and this purpose is "inverted" by the doctrine that "many are made for one." The one is made for the many,--the prince for the people.

[1374] Wicked rulers, terrified by an evil conscience, became the dupe of impostors who professed to speak in the name of the invisible powers.

[1375] MS.:

Split the huge oak, and rocked the rending ground.

Wakefield points out that the lines, ver. 249-252, are from Lucretius, v. 1217.

[1376] MS.:

From op'ning earth showed fiends infernal nigh,
And gods supernal from the bursting sky.

[1377] Horace, Ode iii. bk. iii., translated by Addison:

An umpire, partial, and unjust,
And a lewd woman's impious lust.

[1378] Bolingbroke, Fragment 22: "Men made the Supreme Being after their own image. Fierce and cruel themselves they represented him hating without reason, revenging without provocation, and punishing without measure." Pope says that tyrants would believe such gods as were formed like tyrants. He meant that the tyrants would believe _in_ the gods, but probably found the "in" unmanageable.

[1379] MS.:

The native wood seemed sacred now no more.

People no longer held sacred the natural temple in which, ver. 155, men and beasts formerly "hymned their God," but it was thought necessary to worship in costly buildings, and sacrifice animals on "marble altars."

[1380] Bolingbroke, Fragment 24: "God was appeased provided his altars reeked with gore." A sentence of the same Fragment furnished Pope with his view of heathen sacrifices: "The Supreme Being was represented so vindictive and cruel, that nothing less than acts of the utmost cruelty could appease his anger, and his priests were so many butchers of men and other animals."

[1381] The "flamen" was a priest attached exclusively to the service of some particular god.

[1382] MS.:

The glutton priest first tasted living food.

Bolingbroke, Fragment 24: "As if God was appeased whenever the priest was glutted with roast meat." Wakefield remarks that Pope followed Pythagoras in calling food "living," because it had once been alive. A meat diet is said, ver. 167, to have been the origin of wars, and here we are told that the "flamen first tasted living food" after war and tyranny had over-spread the earth, which is an inconsistency, unless Pope believed that his "glutton priests" were more abstemious than the rest of mankind till animals were sacrificed in the name of religion. The poet, in this Epistle, is loud in denouncing the practice of eating animal food, but he ate it without scruple himself.

[1383] Milton, Par. Lost, i. 392:

First Moloch, horrid king, besmeared with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parent's tears,
Though for the noise of drums and timbrels loud
Their children's cries unheard, that passed through fire
To his grim idol.

Many of Pope's writings are strewed with Miltonic phrases, though they need not be pointed out, and certainly do not detract from his general merit. Such interweavings of significant and forcible expressions have often a striking effect.--BOWLES.

[1384] The image is derived from the old engines of war, such as the catapult which threw stones. The Flamen made an engine of his god, and assailed foes by threatening them with chastisement from heaven.

[1385] Hooker, Eccles. Polity, bk. i. chap. x. sect. 5: "At the first, it may be, that all was permitted unto their discretion which were to rule, till they saw that to live by one man's became the cause of all men's misery. This constrained them to unto laws."--WARTON.

In the MS. there is this couplet after ver. 272:

For say what makes the liberty of man?
'Tis not in doing what he would but can.

The lines were intended to give the reason why law is not an infringement of liberty, and were probably cancelled because the reason was as applicable to cruel as to salutary laws. Upon Pope's principle the worst despotism would not interfere with the liberty of the subject, provided only that resistance was hopeless.

[1386] When the proprietor is asleep the weak rob him by stealth, and when he is awake the strong rob him by violence.

[1387] Bolingbroke, Fragment 6: "Private good depends on the public."

[1388] The inspired strains of the Hebrew Scriptures are the only instance in which poetry has "restored faith and morals." The heathen poets adopted the absurd and profligate fables current in their day, and christian poets have never done more than reflect the prevalent christianity. The term "patriot" is commonly applied to political benefactors, and not to the preachers and disseminators of righteousness. Pope fell back on the fiction of regenerating poets and patriots to avoid all mention of the saints and martyrs who really performed the mighty work. Bolingbroke hated the apostles of genuine religion, and his pupil had no reverence for them.

[1389] Pope breaks down in his comparison of a mixed government to a stringed instrument. An instrument would not be "set justly true," but rendered worthless, when in "touching one" string the musician "must strike the other too."

[1390] This is the very same illustration that Tully uses, De Republica: "Quæ harmonia a musicis dicitur in cantu, ea est in civitate concordia."--WARTON.

[1391] The deduction and application of the foregoing principles, with the use or abuse of civil and ecclesiastical policy, was intended for the subject of the third book.--POPE.

[1392] "Consent" is now limited to mental consent, and the word is obsolete in the sense of "consent of things."

[1393] From Denham's Cooper's Hill:

Wisely she knew the harmony of things,
As well as that of sounds, from discord springs.--HURD.

[1394] "Where the small and weak" are "made to serve, not suffer," "the great and mighty to strengthen, not invade."

[1395] This couplet is at variance with ver. 289-294, where a mixed form of government is lauded for its superiority.

[1396] Cowley's verses on the death of Crashaw:

His path, perhaps, in some nice tenets might
Be wrong; his life, I'm sure, was in the right.

The position is demonstrably absurd in both poets. All conduct originates in principles. Where the principles, therefore, are not strictly pure, and accurately true, the conduct must deviate from the line of perfect rectitude.--WAKEFIELD.

"I prefer a bad action to a bad principle," says Rousseau, somewhere, and Rousseau was right. A bad action may remain isolated; a bad principle is always prolific, because, after all, it is the mind which governs, and man acts according to his thoughts much oftener than he himself imagines.--GUIZOT.

He whose life is in the right cannot, says Pope, in any sense calling for blame, have a wrong faith. But the answer is that his life cannot be in the right unless in so far as it bends to the influences of a true faith. How feeble a conception must that man have of the infinity which lurks in a human spirit, who can persuade himself that its total capacities of life are exhaustible by the few gross acts incident to social relations, or open to human valuation? The true internal acts of moral man are his thoughts, his yearnings, his aspirations, his sympathies or repulsions of heart. This is the life of man as it is appreciable by heavenly eyes.--DE QUINCEY.

[1397] MS.:

Prefer we then the greater to the less,
For charity is all men's happiness.

[1398] MS.:

But charity the greatest of the three.

1 Cor. xiii. 13: "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity."

[1399] The MS. adds this couplet:

Th' extended earth is but one sphere of bliss
To him, who makes another's blessing his.

[1400] At the same time.

[1401] From the Spectator, No. 588, said to be written by Mr. Grove: "Is benevolence inconsistent with self-love? Are their motions contrary? No more than the diurnal rotation of the earth is opposed to its annual; or its motion round its own centre, which might be improved as an illustration of self-love, to that which whirls it about the common centre of the world, answering to universal benevolence."--WARTON.

[1402] "Nature" is not a power coordinate with God, but only the means by which he acts.

[1403] Bolingbroke, Fragment 51: "A due use of our reason makes self-love and social coincide, or even become in effect the same."--WAKEFIELD.

[1404] Happiness is with Pope the sole end of life, and virtue is only a means. The means cannot be more binding than the end, and happiness is not obligatory and virtue is. A certain contempt, again, for pain and privation is heroic, but indifference to moral worth is degradation. Thus virtue is plainly an end in itself, and is superior, not subordinate, to happiness.

[1405] Overlooked in the things which would yield it, and in other things magnified by the imagination, as is happily expressed by Young, when he says, Universal Passion, Sat. i., 238:

None think the great unhappy but the great.

[1406] Pope personified happiness at the beginning, but seems to have dropped that idea in the seventh line, where the deity is suddenly transformed into a plant, from whence this metaphor of a vegetable is carried on through the eleven succeeding lines till he suddenly returns to consider happiness again as a person, in the eighteenth line.--WARTON.

The change from a person to a thing commences at the third verse, where Pope calls happiness "that something," and he changes back to the person in the eighth verse, where he addresses happiness as "thou."

[1407] MS.:

O happiness! to which we all aspire,
Winged with strong hope, and borne with full desire;
That good, we still mistake, and still pursue,
Still out of reach, yet ever in our view;
That ease, for which in want, in wealth we sigh,
That ease, for which we labour and we die;
Tell me, ye sages, (sure 'tis yours to know),
Tell in what mortal soul this ease may grow.

[1408] "Is there," asks Mr. Croker, "any other authority for shine as a noun?" The noun is found in Milton, and Locke, and in much earlier writers, but Johnson says, "it is a word, though not unanalogical, yet ungraceful, and little used."

[1409] "Flaming" is not an appropriate epithet for mines. The line calls up a false idea of splendour, and not a vision of subterranean gloom and desolation.

[1410] Dryden, Æn. xii. 963:

An iron harvest mounts, and still remains to mow.--WAKEFIELD.

Pope's image is not sufficiently distinctive. There is only one word, the epithet "iron," to indicate that he is speaking of military renown, and this epithet, drawn from the material of which swords are made, is also applicable to the sickle.

[1411] "Say in what mortal soil thou deign'st to grow," is the invocation addressed by Pope to Happiness. He now strangely answers his own inquiry in a tone of rebuke, as though it were preposterous to ask the question. "Where grows! where grows it not?"

[1412] These lines follow in the MS.:

Heav'n plants no vain desire in human kind,
But what it prompts to seek, directs to find,
From whom, so strongly pointing at the end,
To hide the means it never could intend.
Now since, whatever happiness we call,
Subsists not in the good of one, but all,
And whosoever would be blessed must bless,
Virtue alone can form that happiness.

A sentence in Hooker's Eccl. Pol., Book i. Chap. viii. Sect. 7, will explain Pope's idea in the last four lines: "If I cannot but wish to receive all good at every man's hand, how should I look to have any part of my desire satisfied, unless myself be careful to satisfy the like desire in other men?"

[1413] "Sincere" in its present use is the opposite of "disingenuous," "deceptive," and has always a moral signification. Formerly it had the sense, which Pope gives it here, of "pure," "unadulterated," without any necessary ethical meaning. Thus Dryden, Palamon and Arcite, Bk. iii.

And none can boast sincere felicity.

Philemon Holland talks of "sincere vermillion," Arbuthnot of "sincere acid," and Hooker speaks of keeping the Scriptures "entire and sincere."

[1414] This was flattery. Bolingbroke was notoriously a prey to factious rancour, and the pangs of disappointed ambition.

[1415] Epicureans.--POPE.

[1416] Stoics.--POPE.

Pope's account of the epicureans is the exact opposite of the truth. He says they "placed bliss in action," whereas Seneca tells us, Benef. iv. 4: "Quæ maxima Epicure felicitas videtur, nihil agit." The poet's account of the stoics is equally wrong. Instead of placing "bliss in ease" they inculcated the sternest self-denial, and untiring efforts to fulfil all virtue.

[1417] Epicureans.--POPE.

[1418] Stoics.--POPE.

The true stoic did not, as Pope asserts, "confess virtue vain." He contended that it was all-sufficient. Till the edition of 1743 this couplet was as follows:

One grants his pleasure is but rest from pain;
One doubts of all; one owns ev'n virtue vain.

The two lines which conclude the paragraph, and which first appeared in the edition of 1743, were written at Warburton's suggestion. The object of the addition was to represent the credulous man who trusted everything as equally deceived with the sceptic who trusted in nothing. Of the last line there is a second version:

One trusts the senses, and one doubts of all.

[1419] Sceptics.--POPE.

Pyrrho and his followers held that we can only know things as they appear, and not as they are. Thence they maintained that appearances must be absolutely indifferent, and that we could be equally happy in all conditions,--in sickness, for instance, Cicero, Fin. ii. 13, as in health. The one reality which Pyrrho admitted was virtue, and this he said (Cicero, Fin. iv. 16), was the supreme good which he who possessed had nothing left to desire.

[1420] Pope's complaint, that the directions of the ancient moralists amounted to no more than that "happiness is happiness," arose from his ignorance of their tenets. The stoics and sceptics placed the supreme good in unconditional virtue, and the epicureans taught the precise doctrine of Pope himself, that pleasure is the goal, and virtue the road. The admonition, "take nature's path," which Pope would substitute for the teaching of these sects, was the maxim on which they all insisted.

[1421] Pope has here adopted the sentiments of the Grecian sage who said, "That if we live according to nature we shall never be poor, and if we live according to opinion we shall never be rich."--RUFFHEAD.

For opinion creates the fantastic wants of fashion and luxury.

[1422] He means that happiness does not "dwell" in any "extreme" of wealth, rank, talent, etc., but that all "states," or classes of men "can reach it."

[1423] MS.:

True happiness, 'tis sacred truth I tell,
Lies but in thinking, &c.

The man who always "thinks right" is infallible in wisdom, and if he always "means well" he must act in obedience to his infallible convictions, when he will also be impeccable. There needs but this, says Pope, to secure happiness. He scoffs at the vague definitions of philosophers, and substitutes the luminous direction that we should be infallible in our views, and impeccable in our conduct.

[1424] "The common sense" and "common ease" of which all the world have an equal share, cannot exceed the measure of sense and ease which falls to the lot of the most foolish and suffering of mankind. This is the same sort of equality that there is between the income of a pauper and a millionaire, since both have half-a-crown a week.

[1425] The MS. adds:

In no extreme lies real happiness,
Not ev'n of good or wisdom in excess.

"Good" and "wisdom" in the last line might be supposed to mean something that was not true wisdom and goodness if Pope had not argued, ver. 259-268, that real wisdom was injurious to happiness. He would have the "right thinking" alloyed with error, and the "meaning well" with evil.

[1426] That is, all which can "justly" or rightly be termed happiness.

[1427] The image is drawn from a person leaning towards another, and listening to what he says. Pope took the expression from the simile of the compasses in Donne's Songs and Sonnets:

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

[1428] The MS. goes on thus:

'Tis not in self it can begin and end,
The bliss of one must with another blend:
The strongest, noblest pleasures of the mind
All hold of mutual converse with the kind.
Can sensual lust, or selfish rapine, know
Such as from bounty, love, or mercy flow?
Of human nature wit its worst may write,
We all revere it in our own despite.

[1429] This couplet follows in the MS.:

To rob another's is to lose our own,
And the just bound once passed the whole is gone.

[1430] MS.:

inference if you make,
That such are happier, 'tis a gross mistake.
Say not, "Heav'n's here profuse, there poorly saves,
And for one monarch makes a thousand slaves;"
You'll find when causes and their ends are known,
'Twas for the thousand heav'n has made that one.
Ev'n mutual want to common blessings tends,
One labours, one directs, and one defends,
While double pay benevolence receives,
Is blessed in what it takes, and what it gives.
In what (heav'n's hand impartial to confess)
Need men be equal but in happiness.
The bliss of all, if heav'n's indulgent aim,
He could not place in riches, pow'r or fame.
In these suppose it placed, one greatly blessed,
Others were hurt, impoverished, or oppressed;
Or did they equally on all descend,
If all were equal must not all contend?

[1431] After ver. 66 in the MS.

Tis peace of mind alone is at a stay:
The rest mad fortune gives or takes away:
All other bliss by accident's debarred,
But virtue's, in the instant, a reward;
In hardest trials operates the best,
And more is relished as the more distressed.--WARBURTON.

There is still another couplet in the MS.:

Virtue's plain consequence is happiness,
Or virtue makes the disappointment less.

[1432] The exemplification of this truth, by a view of the equality of happiness in the several particular stations of life, was designed for the subject of a future Epistle.--POPE.

"Heaven's just balance" is made "equal," says this writer, because men are harassed with fears in proportion to their elevation, and amused with hopes in a state of distress. But a man may be good either in high or low rank; and God does not, to make the happiness of mankind equal, fill the heart of one with idle fears, and of the other with chimerical hopes.--CROUSAZ.

[1433] Sir W. Temple, Works, vol. iii. p. 531: "Whether a good condition with fear of being ill, or an ill with hope of being well, pleases or displeases most." Pope's MS. goes on thus:

How widely then at happiness we aim
By selfish pleasures, riches, pow'r or fame!
Increase of these is but increase of pain,
Wrong the materials, and the labour vain.

[1434] He had in his mind Virgil's description, borrowed from Homer, of the attempt made by the giants, in their war against the gods, to scale the heavens by heaping Ossa upon Pelion, and Olympus upon Ossa. Pope took the expressions "sons of earth," and "mountains piled on mountains," from Dryden's translation, Geor. i. 374.

[1435] "Still" is repeated to give force to the remonstrance. "Attempt still to rise, and Heaven will still survey your vain toil with laughter."

[1436] An allusion to Psalm ii. 1, 4: "Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh."--WAKEFIELD.

[1437] MS.:

The gods with laughter on the labour gaze,
And bury such in the mad heaps they raise.

[1438] "Nature" is a name for the second causes, or instruments, by which God works. Pope speaks as if nature's meaning was distinct from the meaning of God.

[1439] By "mere mankind" Pope means man in his present earthly condition, and not the generality of mankind as distinguished from favoured mortals, for he says, ver. 77, that individuals can no more attain to any greater good than mankind at large.

[1440] From Bolingbroke, Fragment 52: "Agreeable sensations, the series whereof constitutes happiness, must arise from health of body, tranquillity of mind, and a competency of wealth."

[1441] The MS. adds,

Behold the blessing then to none denied
But through our vice, by error or by pride;
Which nothing but excess can render vain,
And then lost only when too much we gain.

[1442] The sense of this ill-expressed line is, that bad men taste the gifts of fortune less than good men, in proportion as they obtain them by worse means. The couplet was originally thus in the MS.:

The good, the bad may fortune's gifts possess;
The bad acquire them worse, enjoy them less.

[1443] "That" is put improperly for "those that."

[1444] MS.:

Secure to find, ev'n from the very worst,
If vice and virtue want, compassion first.

[1445] But are not the one frequently mistaken for the other? How many profligate hypocrites have passed for good?--WARTON.

Men not intrinsically virtuous have often had the good opinion of the world; the happiness they want is a good conscience.

[1446] After ver. 92 in the MS.:

Let sober moralists correct their speech,
No bad man's happy: he is great, or rich.--WARBURTON.

[1447] That is, "who fancy bliss allotted to vice."

[1448] Lord Falkland was killed by a musket ball at the battle of Newbury, Sept. 20, 1643. Turenne was killed by a cannon ball, near Sassback, July 26, 1675. Sir Philip Sidney was mortally wounded by a bullet at Zutphen, Sept. 22, 1586, and died a few days afterwards. Sidney was 32 years of age at his death, Falkland 33, and Turenne 64.

[1449] The Hon. Robert Digby, who died, aged 40, April 19, 1726. Pope wrote his epitaph.

[1450] MS.:

Brave Sidney falls amid the martial strife,
Not that he's virtuous, but profuse of life.
Not virtue snatched Arbuthnot's hopeful bloom,
And sent thee, Craggs, untimely to the tomb.
Say not 'tis virtue, but too soft a frame,
That Walsh his race, and Scud'more ends her name.
Think not their virtues, more though heav'n ne'er gave,
Unites so many Digbys in a grave.
Fierce love, not virtue, Falkland, was thy doom,
Her grief, not virtue, nipped Louisa's bloom.

The Arbuthnot mentioned here was Charles, a clergyman, and son of the celebrated physician. His death in 1732 was supposed to have been occasioned by the lingering effects of a wound he received in a duel he fought while at Oxford with a fellow-collegian, his rival in love. James Craggs died of the small-pox Feb. 14, 1721, aged 35. Virtue had certainly no share in his death, for he was licentious in private life, and in his public capacity accepted a bribe from the South Sea directors. Walsh died in 1708, at the age of 49. His virtue may be estimated by his confession that he had committed every folly in love, except matrimony. Lady Scudamore, widow of Sir James Scudamore, and daughter of the fourth Lord Digby, died of the small-pox, May 3, 1729, aged 44. She left only a daughter, who married, and hence Pope's expression, "Scud'more ends her name." The many Digbys united in one grave were the children of the fifth Lord, the father of the poet's friend, Robert. I do not know what is meant by the "fierce love" which was Falkland's "doom," nor can I identify the Louisa who died of grief.

[1451] William, fifth Lord Digby, was 74 when this fourth Epistle was published in 1734, and he lived to be 92. He died December 1752.

[1452] M. de Belsunce, was made bishop of Marseilles in 1709. In the plague of that city in 1720 he distinguished himself by his activity. He died at a very advanced age in 1755.--WARTON.

[1453] Some anonymous verses in Dryden's Miscellanies, vi. p. 76:

When nature sickens, and with fainting breath
Struggles beneath the bitter pangs of death.--WAKEFIELD.

[1454] Dryden, Virg. x. 1231:

O Rhœbus! we have lived too long for me,
If life and long were terms that could agree.--WAKEFIELD.

[1455] MS.:

Yet hemmed with plagues, and breathing deathful air,
Marseilles' good bishop still possess the chair;
And long kind chance, or heav'n's more kind decree,
Lends an old parent, etc.

Pope's mother died June 7, 1733. She was said by the poet to be 93, but was only 91, if the register of her baptism, June 18, 1642, gives the year of her birth, which is doubtless the case, since an elder sister was baptised in 1641, and a younger in 1643.

[1456] How change can admit, or nature let fall any evil, however short and rare it may be, under the government of an all-wise, powerful, and benevolent Creator, is hardly to be understood. These six lines are perhaps the most exceptionable in the whole poem in point both of sentiment and expression.--WARTON.

Pope's justification of the partial ill which is not a general good is, in substance, that Providence has not supreme dominion over his physical laws, that change and nature act independently of him, and vitiate his work. In place of ver. 113-16 the earlier editions have this couplet:

God sends not ill, 'tis nature lets it fall,
Or chance escape, and man improves it all.

The notion that the disturbing operations of "chance" could explain the existence of evil was intrinsically absurd, and inconsistent with Ep. i., ver. 290, where Pope says that "all chance is direction." Chance is, in strictness, a nonentity, and merely signifies that the cause of an effect is unknown to us, or beyond our control. Neither supposition could apply to the Almighty. Warburton quotes a couplet from the MS., which could not be retained without a glaring contradiction, when Pope had discovered two other evil-doers besides man,--nature and chance:

Of every evil, since the world began
The real source is not in God, but man.

[1457] This comparison of the favourites of the Almighty to the favourites of a weak prince is fallacious and revolting. Weak princes select their favourites from weak or vicious motives. The favourites of heaven are the righteous.

[1458] Warburton says that Pope alluded to Empedocles. The story ran that he pretended to be a divinity, and threw himself into the crater of Ætna, that nobody might know what had become of him, and might conclude that he had been carried up into heaven. All the circumstances of his death are doubtful, and whether he was a calumniated sage, or a conceited madman, legends are not a proper illustration of God's dealings with mankind. Pope had originally written,

T' explore Vesuvius if great Pliny aims,
Shall the loud mountain call back all its flames?

At the eruption of Vesuvius in 79, Pliny, the naturalist, was commanding the Roman fleet in the Gulf of Naples. He made for the coast in the neighbourhood of the volcano, till checked by the falling stones and ashes, he sailed to Stabiæ, and landed. In a few hours the tottering of the houses, shaken by the earthquake, warned him to fly, and according to his nephew he was overtaken by flames and sulphurous vapours, and suffocated. Stabiæ is ten miles from Vesuvius, and the flame and vapour could hardly have been propelled from the mountain.

[1459] The forgetfulness to thunder supposes unconscious obliviousness, the recalling the fires conscious activity. The mountain would not at the same moment forget to keep up the irruption, and remember to restrain it.

[1460] Wollaston, Religion of Nature, sect. v. prop. 18: "If a man's safety should depend upon winds or rains, must new motions be impressed upon the atmosphere?"

[1461] Warton tells us in a note on one of Pope's letters to Bethel, that the latter was "celebrated in two fine lines in the Essay on Man on account of an asthma with which he was afflicted." I find in Ruffhead's Life a quotation from a letter of Pope's to Bethel, "then in Italy," and we may conclude that Bethel, being troubled with an asthma, visited Italy for relief, but that in crossing the sea the "motions of the sea and air" disagreed with him, as they do with most people.--CROKER.

[1462] "You," is Bolingbroke, to whom the epistle is addressed. A writer in the Adventurer, No. 63, quotes Wollaston, Religion of Nature, sect. v. prop. 18: "If a good man be passing by an infirm building, just in the article of falling, can it be expected that God should suspend the force of gravitation till he is gone by, in order to his deliverance?" The illustrations and language Pope copied from Wollaston are the objections of those who deny a special Providence, and Wollaston only stated the arguments to refute them.

[1463] MS.:

Or shall some ruin, as it nods to fall,
For Chartres' brains reserve the hanging wall?
No,--in a scene far higher heav'n imparts
Rewards for spotless hands, and honest hearts.

The last couplet is a direct acknowledgment of a future state, and was probably omitted to avoid contradicting the infidel tenets of Bolingbroke.

[1464] Christians have never raised the objection. They only say that since this world is not a kingdom of the just, reason, as well as revelation, teaches that there must be a kingdom to come.

[1465] Bolingbroke, Fragment 57: "Christian divines complain that good men are often unhappy, and bad men happy. They establish a rule, and are not agreed about the application of it; for who are to be reputed good christians? Go to Rome, they are papists. Go to Geneva, they are calvinists. If particular providences are favourable to those of your communion they will be deemed unjust by every good protestant, and God will be taxed with encouraging idolatry and superstition. If they are favourable to those of any of our communions they will be deemed unjust by every good papist, and God will be taxed with nursing up heresy and schism."

[1466] MS.:

This way, I fear, your project too must fall,
Will just what serves one good man serve 'em all?

[1467] After ver. 142 in some editions:

Give each a system, all must be at strife;
What diff'rent systems for a man and wife?--WARBURTON.

[1468] Young, Universal Passion, Sat. iii. 61.

The very best ambitiously advise.

MS.:

The best in habits variously incline.

[1469] MS.:

E'en leave it as it is; this world, etc.

[1470] He alludes to the complaint of Cato in Addison's tragedy, Act iv. Sc. 4:

Justice gives way to force: the conquered world
Is Cæsar's; Cato has no business in it.

And Act v. Sc. 1:

This world was made for Cæsar.

"If," says Pope, "the world is made for ambitious men, such as Cæsar, it is also made for good men, like Titus." Extreme cases test principles, and to establish his position, that the virtuous in this life have always a larger share of enjoyments than the worldly, Pope should have dealt with some of the numerous instances in which the good have been condemned to tortures in consequence of their goodness.

[1471] Remembering one evening that he had given nothing during the day, Titus exclaimed, "My friends, I have lost a day."

[1472] Unquestionably it must be one of the rewards if Pope is right in maintaining that present happiness is proportioned to virtue. No more cruel mockery could be conceived than to act on his doctrine, and tell a virtuous mother, surrounded by starving children, that she and her little ones were quite as happy as the families who lived in abundance.

[1473] MS.:

Can God be just if virtue be unfed?
Why, fool, is the reward of virtue bread?
'Tis his who labours, his who sows the plain,
'Tis his who threshes, or who grinds the grain.

[1474] The MS. has two readings:

Where madness fights for tyrants or for gain.
Where folly fights for kings or drowns for gain.

In the early editions Pope adopted the first version; in the later the second, with the change of "dives" for "drowns."

[1475] "Why no king?" is equivalent to "why is he not any king?" The proper form would be "why not a king?"

[1476] MS.:

Then give him this, and that, and everything:
Still the complaint subsists; he is no king.
Outward rewards for inward worth are odd:
Why then complain not that he is no god?

Ver. 162 in the text is inconsistent with ver. 161. Pope supposes the good to rise in their demands until they rebel against receiving external rewards for internal merits, and insist that man should be a god, and earth a heaven, which heaven is one of the externals they have just indignantly repudiated.

[1477] Pope is speaking of the good, and what good man ever did "ask and reason" according to Pope's representation?

[1478] In a work of so serious a cast surely such strokes of levity, of satire, of ridicule, as also lines 204, 223, 276, however poignant and witty, are ill-placed and disgusting, are violations of that propriety which Pope in general so strictly observed.--WARTON.

[1479] MS.:

But come, for virtue the just payment fix,
For humble merit say a coach and six,
For justice a Lord Chancellor's awful gown, &c.

Pope showed his consciousness of the weakness of his cause by raising false issues. Virtue would not be rewarded by swords, gowns, and coaches, but is it rewarded by the cross, the stake, the rack, and the dungeon?

[1480] This sarcasm was directed against George II. When Prince of Wales he quarrelled with his father, and patronised the opposition. On his accession to the throne he abandoned the opposition, to which Pope's friends belonged, and retained the ministers of George I.

[1481] After ver. 172 in the MS.:

Say, what rewards this idle world imparts,
Or fit for searching heads or honest hearts.--WARBURTON.

[1482] Heaven in this line has either improperly the double sense of a person and a place,--the God of heaven, and the kingdom of the blessed--or else "there" is a clumsy tautological excrescence to furnish a rhyme.

[1483] These eight succeeding lines were not in former editions; and indeed none of them, especially lines 177 and 179, do any credit to the author.--WARTON.

From Warton's note it would appear that the lines were first printed in his own edition in 1797, whereas they were published in Pope's edition of 1743. The poet had then renounced Bolingbroke for Warburton, and ventured to admit that there was a heaven reserved for man.

[1484] The "boy and man makes an individual" is not grammar.

[1485] Thus till the edition of 1743:

For riches, can they give, but to the just,
His own contentment, or another's trust?

[1486] We see in the world, alas! too many examples of riches giving repute and trust, content and pleasure to the worthless and profligate.--WARTON.

[1487] Dryden:

Let honour and preferment go for gold,
But glorious beauty isn't to be sold.

The MS. adds:

Were health of mind and body purchased here,
'Twere worth the cost; all else is bought too dear.

[1488] The man, that is, who is the lover of human kind, and the object of their love.

[1489] No rational believer in Providence ever did suppose that to have less than a thousand a year was a mark of God's hatred, or ever doubted that the sufferings of good men in this life were consistent with the dispensations of wisdom and mercy. Pope began by undertaking to prove that happiness was independent of externals, and drops into the separate and indubitable proposition that earthly happiness and the blessing of God are not dependent upon the possession of a thousand a year.

[1490] This seems not to be proper; the words "flaunt" and "flutter" might with more propriety have changed places.--JOHNSON.

The satirical aggravation here is conducted with great dexterity by an interchange of terms: the gaudy word "flaunt" properly belongs to the sumptuous dress, and that of "flutter" to the tattered garment.--WAKEFIELD.

Wakefield did not perceive that the language no longer fitted the facts; for though flimsy rags flutter, the stiff brocade did not. Pope avoided the inconsistency in his first draught:

Oft of two brothers one shall be surveyed
Flutt'ring in rags, one flaunting in brocade.

[1491] This must be understood as if Pope had written, "The cobbler is aproned."

[1492] MS.:

What differs more, you cry, than gown and hood?
A wise man and a fool, a bad and good.

The miserable rhyme in the text had the authority of a pun in Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI. Act v. Sc. 6:

Why what a peevish fool was that of Crete
That taught his son the office of a fowl?
And yet, for all his wings, the fool was drowned.

[1493] He alluded to Philip V. of Spain, who resigned his crown to his son, Jan. 10, 1724, and retired to a monastery. The son died in August, and on Sept. 5, 1724, Philip reascended the throne. Weak-minded, hard-hearted, superstitious, and melancholy mad, he was a just instance of a man who owed all his consideration to the trappings of royalty.

[1494] That is, the rest is mere outside appearance,--the leather of the cobbler's apron, or the prunella of the clergyman's gown. Prunella was a species of woollen stuff.

[1495] _Cordon_ is the French term for the ribbon of the orders of knighthood; but in England the ribbons are never called "strings," nor would Pope have used the term unless he had wanted a rhyme for "kings." The concluding phrase of the couplet was aimed at the supposed influence of the mistresses of George II.

[1496] Cowley, Translation of Hor. Epist. i. 10:

To kings or to the favourites of kings.--HURD.

[1497] In the MS. thus:

The richest blood, right-honourably old,
Down from Lucretia to Lucretia rolled,
May swell thy heart and gallop in thy breast,
Without one dash of usher or of priest:
Thy pride as much despise all other pride
As Christ-church once all colleges beside.--WARBURTON.

[1498] A bad rhyme to the preceding word "race." It is taken from Boileau, Sat. v.:

Et si leur sang tout pur, ainsi que leur noblesse,
Est passé jusqu'à vous de Lucrèce en Lucrèce.--WARTON.

The bad rhyme did not appear till the edition of 1743. The couplet had previously stood as follows:

Thy boasted blood, a thousand years or so
May from Lucretia to Lucretia flow.

[1499] Hall, Sat. iii.:

Or tedious bead rolls of descended blood,
From father Japhet since Deucalion's flood.--WAKEFIELD.

[1500] There are two other versions of this couplet in the MS.:

But to make wits of fools, and chiefs of cowards,
What can? not all the pride of all the Howards.

And,

But make one wise, or loved, or happy man,
Not all the pride of all the Howards can.

[1501] Pope took the phrase from Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, vol. i., p. 26: "Who can forbear laughing when he thinks on all the great men that have been so serious on the subject of that Macedonian madman?" Warton protests against the application of the term to Alexander the Great, and adds that Charles XII. of Sweden "deserved not to be joined with him." The objection is well-founded, for Pope not only compared them in their rage for war, but said that neither "looked further than his nose," which was true of Charles XII., and false of Alexander, who mingled grand schemes of civilisation with his selfish lust of dominion.

[1502] "To find an enemy of all mankind," signifies to find some one who is an enemy of all mankind, whereas Pope means to say that heroes desire to find all mankind their enemies. He exaggerated the "strangeness" of the conqueror's "purpose." The making enemies is incidental to the purpose, but is not itself the end.

[1503] The idea expressed in this line is put more clearly by Johnson in his description of Charles XII:

Peace courts his hand, but spreads her charms in vain,
"Think nothing gained," he cries, "till nought remain."

[1504] There is something so familiar, nay even vulgar, in these two lines as renders them very unworthy of our author.--RUFFHEAD.