AN ESSAY ON MAN, IN FOUR EPISTLES

TO

HENRY ST. JOHN, LORD BOLINGBROKE.

WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1732.

AN ESSAY ON MAN.—Addressed to a Friend. Part I.

London: Printed for J. Wilford, at the Three Flower-de-luces, behind the Chapter-house, St. Paul's. Price one shilling. Folio.

This is the first edition of Epistle I. of the Essay on Man, which was published anonymously, and without any date on the title-page, Feb. 1733. It was also printed in quarto and octavo. The octavo has not the prefatory address "To the Reader." The right to print each epistle of the Essay on Man for one year was bought by Gilliver for 50l. an Epistle.

AN ESSAY ON MAN.—In Epistles to a Friend. Epistle I.

Corrected by the Author. London, etc. Folio.

The rest of the title-page is the same as in the first edition. This second edition has a table of Contents to the first three Epistles, which were originally published without the table. The fourth Epistle had the table prefixed from the outset. With the exception of the first Epistle, I am not aware that there was a second edition of any part of the Essay on Man till the whole was incorporated in the works of the poet. An octavo edition, published by Wilford in 1736, is called the seventh; but he may have counted in the three sizes of the first edition, together with the editions which had appeared in Pope's works.

AN ESSAY ON MAN.—In Epistles to a Friend. Epistle II.

London: Printed for J. Wilford, at the Three Flower-de-luces, behind the Chapter-house, St. Paul's. Price one shilling. Folio.

The second Epistle appeared about April, 1733.

The title of the third and fourth Epistle is the same as that of the second. At the end of the third Epistle is this notice: "N.B. The rest of the work will be published the next winter," and the promise was kept by the publication of the fourth Epistle about the middle of January, 1734. The last three Epistles were printed like their precursor, in quarto and octavo, as well as folio. The octavo edition of all four Epistles differs from the rest in having the year on the title-page,—the first three, 1733, the fourth Epistle, 1734.

AN ESSAY ON MAN: Being the First Book of Ethic Epistles.

To H. St. John L. Bolingbroke. With the Commentary and Notes of W. Warburton, A.M.

London: Printed by W. Bowyer for M. Cooper, at the Globe, in Paternoster-Row, 1743. 4to.

This is the first edition with Warburton's Commentary, and the last which appeared during the life-time of Pope. The Essay on Criticism is in the same volume, which was kept back for some months after it was printed, and was not published till 1744.

Warburton and Hurd have introduced a new kind of criticism, in which they discover views and purposes the authors never had, and they themselves never believed they had, but consider them as the refinements of their own delicate conceptions, only taking hints from these authors, to show how much higher they themselves would have carried the same ideas. Warburton's discovering "the regularity" of Pope's Essay on Criticism, and "the whole scheme" of his Essay on Man, I happen to know to be mere absurd refinement in creating conformities, and that from Pope himself, though he thought fit to adopt them afterwards. By this method of overlooking the plain and simple meaning which presents itself at first sight (as that of good authors always does, only that there is no credit to be gained in discovering what any one else could discover) it might clearly be shown that Pope's Art of Criticism, is, indeed, an Essay on Man, and his Essay on Man was really designed by the deep author for an Art of Criticism. I know that these would not be more false than the assertion and sophistry in proving "the regularity" of his Art of Criticism, since he, when often speaking of it, before he so much as knew Warburton, spoke of it always, as an "irregular collection of thoughts thrown together as they offered themselves, as Horace's Art of Poetry was, and written in imitation of that irregularity," which he even admired, and said was beautiful. As for his Essay on Man, as I was witness to the whole conduct of it in writing, and actually have his original MSS. for it from the first scratches of the four books, to the several finished copies, all which, with the MS. of his Essay on Criticism, and several of his other works, he gave me himself for the pains I took in collating the whole with the printed editions, at his request, on my having proposed to him the "making an edition of his works in the manner of Boileau's,"—as to this noblest of his works, I know that he never dreamed of the scheme he afterwards adopted, perhaps for good reasons, for he had taken terror about the clergy, and Warburton himself, at the general alarm of its fatalism, and deistical tendency, of which however we talked with him (my father and I) frequently at Twickenham, without his appearing to understand it otherwise, or ever thinking to alter those passages, which we suggested as what might seem the most exceptionable.[720]—Richardson.

The Essay on Man was at first given, as Mr. Pope told me, to Dr. Young, to Dr. Desaguliers,[721] to Lord Bolingbroke, to Lord Paget,[722] and in short to everybody but to him who was capable of writing it. While several of his acquaintances read the Essay on Man as the work of an unknown author, they fairly owned they did not understand it,[723] but when the reputation of the poem became secured by the knowledge of the writer, it soon grew so clear and intelligible, that, on the appearance of the Comment on it, they told him they wondered the editor should think a large and minute interpretation necessary.—Warburton.

[In 1733] Pope published the first part of what he persuaded himself to think a system of ethics, under the title of an Essay on Man, which, if his letter to Swift of September 14, 1725, be rightly explained by the commentator,[724] had been eight years under his consideration, and of which he seems to have desired the success with great solicitude. He had now many open and doubtless many secret enemies. The dunces were yet smarting with the war; and the superiority which he publicly arrogated disposed the world to wish his humiliation. All this he knew, and against all this he provided. His own name, and that of his friend to whom the work is inscribed,[725] were in the first editions carefully suppressed, and the poem, being of a new kind, was ascribed to one or another, as favour determined or conjecture wandered: it was given, says Warburton, to every man except him only who could write it. Those who like only when they like the author, and who are under the dominion of a name, condemned it, and those admired it who are willing to scatter praise at random, which while it is unappropriated excites no envy. Those friends of Pope that were trusted with the secret went about lavishing honours on the new-born poet, and hinting that Pope was never so much in danger from any former rival. To those authors whom he had personally offended, and to those whose opinion the world considered as decisive, and whom he suspected of envy or malevolence, he sent his Essay as a present before publication, that they might defeat their own enmity by praises which they could not afterwards decently retract. With these precautions, in 1732[3] was published the first part of the Essay on Man. There had been for some time a report that Pope was busy upon a system of morality; but this design was not discovered in the new poem, which had a form and a title with which its readers were unacquainted. Its reception was not uniform; some thought it a very imperfect piece, though not without good lines. While the author was unknown, some, as will always happen, favoured him as an adventurer, and some censured him as an intruder, but all thought him above neglect: the sale increased, and editions were multiplied. The second and third Epistles were published, and Pope was, I believe, more and more suspected of writing them. At last, in 1734, he avowed the fourth, and claimed the honour of a moral poet.

In the conclusion it is sufficiently acknowledged that the doctrine of the Essay on Man was received from Bolingbroke, who is said to have ridiculed Pope, among those who enjoyed his confidence, as having adopted and advanced principles of which he did not perceive the consequence, and as blindly propagating opinions contrary to his own. That those communications had been consolidated into a scheme regularly drawn, and delivered to Pope, from whom it returned only transformed from prose to verse, has been reported, but hardly can be true.[726] The Essay plainly appears the fabric of a poet: what Bolingbroke supplied could be only the first principles; the order, illustration, and embellishments must all be Pope's. These principles it is not my business to clear from obscurity, dogmatism, or falsehood; but they were not immediately examined: philosophy and poetry have not often the same readers, and the Essay abounded in splendid amplifications and sparkling sentences, which were read and admired with no great attention to their ultimate purpose; its flowers caught the eye, which did not see what the gay foliage concealed, and for a time flourished in the sunshine of universal approbation. So little was any evil tendency discovered, that, as innocence is unsuspicious, many read it for a manual of piety.

Its reputation soon invited a translator. It was first turned into French prose, and afterwards by Resnel into verse. Both translations fell into the hands of Crousaz, who first, when he had the version in prose, wrote a general censure, and afterwards reprinted Resnel's version with particular remarks upon every paragraph.[727] Crousaz was a professor of Switzerland, eminent for his treatise of Logic, and his Examen de Pyrrhonisme, and, however little known or regarded here, was no mean antagonist. His mind was one of those in which philosophy and piety are happily united. He was accustomed to argument and disquisition, and was perhaps grown too desirous of detecting faults; but his intentions were always right, his opinions were solid, and his religion pure. His incessant vigilance for the promotion of piety disposed him to look with distrust upon all metaphysical systems of theology, and all schemes of virtue and happiness purely rational; and therefore it was not long before he was persuaded that the positions of Pope, as they terminated for the most part in natural religion, were intended to draw mankind away from revelation, and to represent the whole course of things as a necessary concatenation of indissoluble fatality; and it is undeniable that, in many passages, a religious eye may easily discover expressions not very favourable to morals or liberty.

About this time Warburton began to make his appearance in the first ranks of learning. He was a man of vigorous faculties, a mind fervid and vehement, supplied, by incessant and unlimited inquiry, with wonderful extent and variety of knowledge, which yet had not oppressed his imagination nor clouded his perspicacity. To every work he brought a memory full fraught, together with a fancy fertile of original combinations, and at once exerted the powers of the scholar, the reasoner, and the wit. But his knowledge was too multifarious to be always exact, and his pursuits too eager to be always cautious. His abilities gave him a haughty confidence, which he disdained to conceal or mollify; and his impatience of opposition disposed him to treat his adversaries with such contemptuous superiority as made his readers commonly his enemies, and excited against the advocate the wishes of some who favoured the cause. He seems to have adopted the Roman emperor's determination, "oderint dum metuant;" he used no allurements of gentle language, but wished to compel rather than persuade. His style is copious without selection, and forcible without neatness; he took the words that presented themselves; his diction is coarse and impure, and his sentences are unmeasured. He had in the early part of his life pleased himself with the notice of inferior wits, and corresponded with the enemies of Pope. A letter was produced when he had perhaps himself forgotten it, in which he tells Concanen, "Dryden, I observe, borrows for want of leisure, and Pope for want of genius; Milton out of pride, and Addison out of modesty." And when Theobald published Shakespeare, in opposition to Pope, the best notes were supplied by Warburton.[728] But the time was now come when Warburton was to change his opinion, and Pope was to find a defender in him who had contributed so much to the exaltation of his rival. The arrogance of Warburton excited against him every artifice of offence, and therefore it may be supposed that his union with Pope was censured as hypocritical inconstancy; but surely to think differently at different times of poetical merit may be easily allowed. Such opinions are often admitted and dismissed without nice examination. Who is there that has not found reason for changing his opinion about questions of greater importance? Warburton, whatever was his motive, undertook, without solicitation, to rescue Pope from the talons of Crousaz, by freeing him from the imputation of favouring fatality or rejecting revelation; and from month to month continued a vindication of the Essay on Man in the literary journal of that time, called The Republic of Letters.[729] Pope, who probably began to doubt the tendency of his own work, was glad that the positions, of which he perceived himself not to know the full meaning, could by any mode of interpretation be made to mean well. How much he was pleased with his gratuitous defender the following letter evidently shows:—

"April 11, 1739.

"Sir,—I have just received from Mr. R[obinson][730] two more of your letters. It is in the greatest hurry imaginable that I write this; but I cannot help thanking you in particular for your third letter, which is so extremely clear, short, and full, that I think Mr. Crousaz ought never to have another answer, and deserved not so good an one. I can only say you do him too much honour, and me too much right, so odd as the expression seems; for you have made my system as clear as I ought to have done, and could not. It is indeed the same system as mine, but illustrated with a ray of your own, as they say our natural body is the same still when it is glorified. I am sure I like it better than I did before, and so will every man else. I know I meant just what you explain; but I did not explain my own meaning so well as you. You understand me as well as I do myself; but you express me better than I could express myself. Pray accept the sincerest acknowledgments. I cannot but wish these letters were put together in one book,[731] and intend, with your leave, to procure a translation of part, at least, or of all of them into French; but I shall not proceed a step without your consent and opinion, etc."

By this fond and eager acceptance of an exculpatory comment, Pope testified that whatever might be the seeming or real import of the principles which he had received from Bolingbroke, he had not intentionally attacked religion; and Bolingbroke, if he meant to make him, without his own consent, an instrument of mischief, found him now engaged, with his eyes open, on the side of truth. It is known that Bolingbroke concealed from Pope his real opinions. He once discovered them to Mr. Hooke, who related them again to Pope, and was told by him that he must have mistaken the meaning of what he heard; and Bolingbroke, when Pope's uneasiness incited him to desire an explanation, declared that Hooke had misunderstood him. Bolingbroke hated Warburton, who had drawn his pupil from him; and a little before Pope's death they had a dispute from which they parted with mutual aversion.[732] From this time Pope lived in the closest intimacy with his commentator, and amply rewarded his kindness and his zeal; for he introduced him to Mr. Murray, by whose interest he became preacher at Lincoln's Inn, and to Mr. Allen, who gave him his niece and his estate, and by consequence a bishopric. When he died, he left him the property of his works, a legacy which may be reasonably estimated at four thousand pounds.

Pope's fondness for the Essay on Man appeared by his desire of its propagation. Dobson, who had gained reputation by his version of Prior's Solomon, was employed by him to translate it into Latin verse, and was for that purpose some time at Twickenham; but he left his work, whatever was the reason, unfinished,[733] and, by Benson's invitation, undertook the longer task of Paradise Lost. Pope then desired his friend[734] to find a scholar who should turn his Essay into Latin prose, but no such performance has ever appeared.

The Essay on Man was a work of great labour and long consideration, but certainly not the happiest of Pope's performances. The subject is perhaps not very proper for poetry, and the poet was not sufficiently master of his subject; metaphysical morality was to him a new study, he was proud of his acquisitions, and, supposing himself master of great secrets, was in haste to teach what he had not learned. Thus he tells us, in the first epistle, that from the nature of the Supreme Being may be deduced an order of beings such as mankind, because infinite excellence can do only what is best. He finds out that these beings must be "somewhere," and that "all the question is whether man be in a wrong place." Surely if, according to the poet's Leibnitzian reasoning, we may infer that man ought to be, only because he is, we may allow that his place is the right place because he has it. Supreme Wisdom is not less infallible in disposing than in creating. But what is meant by "somewhere," and "place," and "wrong place," it had been vain to ask Pope, who probably had never asked himself.

Having exalted himself into the chair of wisdom, he tells us much that every man knows, and much that he does not know himself: that we see but little, and that the order of the universe is beyond our comprehension—an opinion not very uncommon; and that there is a chain of subordinate beings "from infinite to nothing," of which himself and his readers are equally ignorant. But he gives us one comfort which, without his help, he supposes unattainable, in the position "that though we are fools, yet God is wise."

This Essay affords an egregious instance of the predominance of genius, the dazzling splendour of imagery, and the seductive powers of eloquence. Never was penury of knowledge, and vulgarity of sentiment, so happily disguised. The reader feels his mind full, though he learns nothing, and when he meets it in its new array, no longer knows the talk of his mother and his nurse. When these wonder-working sounds sink into sense, and the doctrine of the Essay, disrobed of its ornaments, is left to the powers of its naked excellence, what shall we discover? That we are, in comparison with our Creator, very weak and ignorant,—that we do not uphold the chain of existence—and that we could not make one another with more skill than we are made. We may learn yet more,—that the arts of human life were copied from the instinctive operations of other animals,—that if the world be made for man, it may be said that man was made for geese.[735] To these profound principles of natural knowledge are added some moral instructions equally new,—that self interest, well understood, will produce social concord—that men are mutual gainers by mutual benefits—that evil is sometimes balanced by good—that human advantages are unstable and fallacious, of uncertain duration and doubtful effect—that our true honour is not to have a great part, but to act it well—that virtue only is our own—and that happiness is always in our power. Surely a man of no very comprehensive search may venture to say that he has heard all this before; but it was never till now recommended by such a blaze of embellishments, or such sweetness of melody. The vigorous contraction of some thoughts, the luxuriant amplification of others, the incidental illustrations, and sometimes the dignity, sometimes the softness of the verse, enchain philosophy, suspend criticism, and oppress judgment by overpowering pleasure. This is true of many paragraphs, yet if I had undertaken to exemplify Pope's felicity of composition before a rigid critic, I should not select the Essay on Man; for it contains more lines unsuccessfully laboured, more harshness of diction, more thoughts imperfectly expressed, more levity without elegance, and more heaviness without strength, than will easily be found in all his other works.—Johnson.

Pope has not wandered into any useless digressions; has employed no fictions, no tale or story, and has relied chiefly on the poetry of his style for the purpose of interesting his readers. His style is concise and figurative, forcible and elegant. He has many metaphors and images, artfully interspersed in the driest passages, which stood most in need of such ornaments. Nevertheless there are too many lines, in this performance, plain and prosaic. If any beauty be uncommonly transcendent and peculiar, it is brevity of diction, which, in a few instances, and those perhaps pardonable, has occasioned obscurity. It is hardly to be imagined how much sense, how much thinking, how much observation on human life, is condensed together in a small compass.

The late Lord Bathurst repeatedly assured me that he had read the whole scheme of the Essay on Man, in the handwriting of Bolingbroke, and drawn up in a series of propositions, which Pope was to amplify, versify, and illustrate. It has been alleged that Pope did not fully comprehend the drift of the system communicated to him by Bolingbroke, but the remarkable words of his intimate friend, Mr. Jonathan Richardson, a man of known integrity and honour, clearly evince that he did. To the testimony of Richardson, which is decisive, I will now add that Lord Lyttelton, with his usual frankness and ingenuity, assured me that he had frequently talked with Pope on the subject, whose opinions were at that time conformable to his own, when he and his friends were too much inclined to deism. Mr. Harte more than once assured me, that he had seen the pressing letter Dr. Young wrote to Pope, urging him to write something on the side of revelation, to which he alluded in the first Night Thought:

And when Harte frequently made the same request, he used to answer, "No, no! You have already done it," alluding to Harte's Essay on Reason, which Harte thought a lame apology, and hardly serious.—Warton.

The ground of the Essay on Man is philosophy, not poetry. The poetry is only the colouring, if I may say so, and to the colouring the eye is chiefly attentive. We hardly think of the philosophy whether it is good or bad; whether it is profound or specious; whether it evinces deep thinking, or exhibits only in new and pompous array the "babble of the nurse." Scarcely any one, till a controversy was raised, thought of the doctrines, but a thousand must have been warmed by the pictures, the addresses, the sublime interspersions of description, and the nice and harmonious precision of every word, and of almost every line. Whether, as a system of philosophy, it inculcated fate or not, no one paused to inquire;[736] but every eye read a thousand times, and every lip, perhaps, repeated, "Lo, the poor Indian," "The lamb thy riot," "Oh, happiness," and many other passages. All these illustrative and secondary images are painted from the source of genuine poetry; from nature, not from art. They therefore, independent of powers displayed in the versification, raise the Essay on Man, considered in the abstract, into genuine poetry, although the poetical part is subservient to the philosophical.

It must be confessed, unfair as Johnson's criticism is, it is not entirely destitute of truth. Many of Pope's conclusions in this Essay, after a vast deal of fine verbiage and apparent argument, are such as required very little proof,—"though man's a fool, yet God is wise,"—and many other axioms equally true. But can we say the whole exhibits only a train of tritenesses? "Materiam superabat opus," it is acknowledged; and possibly, had it been more recondite, it could not have been made the vehicle of so many acknowledged beauties of expression, of imagery, and of poetic illustration. The more it is read the more it will be relished, and the more will the nice precision of every word, and the general beauty of its structure, be acknowledged. Though the treasures of knowledge within be not, perhaps, either very rich or rare, yet, to say it contains no striking sentiments, no truths placed in a more advanced as well as a more pleasing light, would be a manifest and palpable injustice. After all, poetry is not a good vehicle for philosophy, but as a philosophical poem, take it altogether, it would not be very easy, with the exception of Lucretius, to find its equal.—Bowles.

Bolingbroke amused his unwelcome leisure during his exile in studying the infidel philosophy which prevailed in France. The vices of his nature are conspicuous in his metaphysical writings. He pretends to abstruse learning, and it is apparent that he has done little more than pick up fragments of systems at second-hand. He assumes a commanding superiority over his illustrious predecessors, of whom he commonly speaks with insane contempt, and he has not enunciated a single new doctrine, or put one old doctrine in a novel light. He affects to soar above sinister motives and prejudices, and writes with the rancour of a bitter partisan who is the creature of passion. He denounces the dishonesty of christian apologists, and perpetually misrepresents them; he inveighs against their inconsistencies, and falls himself into repeated contradictions. The characteristics of the old political debater are preserved intact in the philosopher. He kept his parliamentary style with the rest,—the diffuse rhetoric, the constant repetitions, the lengthy preparation for ideas not worth the prelude. The mind droops over the pretentious verbiage, and the magnificent promise of results which never come. "Who," said Burke, "now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through?"[737] The cheat once detected, no one wearies himself in the pursuit of a flying phantom.

In 1723 Bolingbroke was permitted to return to England. After a short visit he went back to France, and did not settle here till October, 1724. He soon contracted an intimacy with Pope, and imparted to him his irreligious metaphysics. Bolingbroke's knowledge of philosophy, though not profound, was respectable, and with the uninformed he could disguise his want of depth by a flux of specious language. Pope, ignorant of mental, moral, and theological science, mistook his oracular arrogance for real supremacy, his discordant sophisms for demonstrations, his hackneyed plagiarisms for originality. He thought him by much the greatest man he had ever known, and of all his titles to fame the chief he imagined was as a "writer and philosopher."[738] He ranked him among the metaphysical luminaries of the world, and never suspected that the moment his disquisitions were communicated to the public they would be tossed aside with disdain, and consigned to lasting neglect.

Bolingbroke persuaded Pope to versify portions of the philosophy he admired so extravagantly.[739] A large scheme was drawn up, the outline of which Pope repeated to Spence. "The first book, you know, of my ethic work is on the Nature of Man. The second would have been on knowledge and its limits. Here would have come in an essay on education, part of which I have inserted in the Dunciad. The third was to have treated of government, both ecclesiastical and civil. The fourth would have been on morality in eight or nine of the most concerning branches of it, four of which would have been the two extremes to each of the cardinal virtues."[740] These four cardinal virtues,—justice, temperance, prudence, and fortitude—would alone have required twelve epistles, since every virtue was to be treated on the Aristotelian plan, and divided into rational medium, deficiency, and excess. The cardinal virtues were either to be again subdivided, or else supplemented by subordinate virtues, and all were to be presented under the triple form. "Each class," said Pope, speaking of the "eight or nine most concerning branches" of morality, "may take up three epistles: one, for instance, against Avarice; another against Prodigality: and the third on the moderate use of Riches, and so of the rest."[741] A short trial convinced Pope that the scheme was too vast for a slow composer. When the first book, which forms the Essay on Man, was completed, he told Spence that "he had drawn in the plan much narrower than it was at first," and he attached to some copies of the Essay, which he circulated among his particular friends, a table of this diminished frame-work.

"INDEX TO THE ETHIC EPISTLES.

Book I.— Of the Nature and State of Man.

Epistle 1.—With respect to the Universe.

" 2.—As an Individual.

" 3.—With respect to Society.

" 4.—With respect to Happiness.

Book II. —Of the Use of Things.

Of the Limits of Human Reason. Of the Use of Learning. Of the Use of Wit. Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men. Of the Particular Characters of Women. Of the Principles and Use of Civil and Ecclesiastical Polity. Of the Use of Education. A View of the Equality of Happiness in the several Conditions of Men. Of the Use of Riches." [742]

The cardinal virtues, with nearly all "the most concerning branches of morality," were omitted from the abbreviated plan, which was still too large for Pope's patience, and he left much of the work unexecuted.

He commenced with some of the topics enumerated in the second book of his "index." "Bid Pope talk to you of the work he is about," wrote Bolingbroke to Swift, Nov. 19, 1729. "It is a fine one, and will be, in his hands, an original. His sole complaint is that he finds it too easy in the execution. This flatters his laziness. It flatters my judgment who always thought that, universal as his talents are, this is eminently and peculiarly his above all the writers I know, living or dead. I do not except Horace." "The work," adds Pope, "which Lord Bolingbroke speaks of with such abundant partiality is a system of ethics in the Horatian way." Bolingbroke's comparison of the work to Horace, and Pope's phrase "the Horatian way," show that they spoke of the Moral Essays, which, with the Essay on Man, were at first included under the general title of Ethic Epistles. The resemblance to Horace would not apply to the Essay on Man in substance or style,—not in style, for Pope says himself that the Essay was modelled on "the grave march of Lucretius" in contradistinction to the familiar "gaieties of Horace,"[743]; not in substance, for Horace did not write a philosophical poem on natural religion, nor could he have been placed by Bolingbroke at the head of a class of philosophical poets to which he in no way belonged. Neither could Bolingbroke have said of Pope that "the talent eminently and peculiarly his, above all writers living or dead," was the power of sounding the depths of philosophy. The praise was intended for the satiric sketches of men and manners which make up the Moral Essays. These are truly in the "Horatian way," and in a vein characteristic of the bent of Pope's mind.

Bolingbroke furnished little or nothing to the Horatian epistles. His services commenced with the Essay on Man. Pope was revolving this part of the scheme in May, 1730, when he said to Spence, "The first epistle is to be to the whole work what a scale is to a book of maps; and in this, I reckon, lies my greatest difficulty: not only in settling and ranging the parts of it aright, but in making them agreeable enough to be read with pleasure."[744] A few months later Bolingbroke writes to Lord Bathurst, Oct. 8, 1730, that he and Pope "are at present deep in metaphysics." The matter intended for the first epistle was expanded into four epistles as the work proceeded, and in August, 1731, Bolingbroke announced to Swift that three of them were completed, and that the fourth was in hand. Eighteen months more elapsed before any portion of the poem was published; and Pope doubtless spent the interval in repeated revisions. It was not his habit to go straight forward in regular order, and leave no gaps or flaws as he went along. When he told Caryll in December, 1730, that he was "writing on life and manners, not exclusive of religious regards," he adds, "I have many fragments which I am beginning to put together, but nothing perfect or finished, nor in any condition to be shown, except to a friend at a fire-side." This system of composing disjointed fragments, and methodising them afterwards, was unfavourable to continuity and comprehension of thought, and did not help to diminish the want of connection in his arguments, and of consistency in his opinions.

The project of the Essay on Man was kept a secret from all but a few of Pope's friends. To others he only spoke of his ethic epistles in the "Horatian way." Caryll, on hearing from him that he had taken to religion and morals, recommended Pascal's Thoughts, and Pope answered, Feb. 6, 1731, "I have been beforehand with you in it, but he will be of little use to my design, which is rather to ridicule ill men than to preach to them. I fear our age is past all other correction." The Essay on Man was then in full progress, and Pope sent a false report that the style and tenor of the work might not betray him when it was published. The first epistle appeared anonymously in February, 1733, and to divert suspicion, the poet put forth in January, with his name, his Epistle on the Use of Riches, and a week or two afterwards one of his Imitations of Horace. He had a subtler contrivance for misleading the public. He made "lane" rhyme to "name" in his second epistle, and told Harte the bad rhyme was a disguise to escape detection. "Harte remembered," says Warton, "to have often heard it urged in enquiries about the author, whilst he was unknown, that it was impossible it could be Pope's on account of this very passage."[745] Along with "lane" and "name," the first and second epistles contained the rhymes which follow: "here, refer—pierce, universe,—above, Jove—plain, man—fault, ought—food, blood—home, come—abodes, gods—appears, bears—alone, none—race, grass—flood, wood—want, elephant—join, line—alone, one—mourns, burns—sphere, bear—rest, beast—sphere, fair—boast, frost—road, God—preferred, guard—tossed, coast—joined, mind—caprice, vice." There must have been some strange peculiarity in the ears of a generation which could be revolted by "lane" and "name," and welcome such rhymes as these. The anecdote cannot be correct. A liberal admixture of faulty rhymes is a common characteristic of Pope, and the disguise would have been greater if all the rhymes had been good.[746]

Johnson has told Pope's motive for publishing the Essay anonymously, and the manœuvres he practised to secure commendation. He had previously, when speaking to Swift of the Essay, professed his usual indifference to praise. "I agree with you," he said, Dec. 1, 1731, "in my contempt of most popularity, fame, &c. Even as a writer I am cool in it, and whenever you see what I am now writing, you will be convinced I would please but a few, and, if I could, make mankind less admirers and greater reasoners." After the little plot had been played out, he still kept up the false pretence in a letter to Duncombe, Oct. 20, 1734. "Truly, I had not the least thought of stealing applause by suppressing my name to that Essay. I wanted only to hear truth, and was more afraid of my partial friends than enemies."[747] He lifted up the mask with Swift, and avowed that his object was to get his philosophy approved. "The design of concealing myself was good," he said, Sept. 15, 1734, "and had its full effect; I was thought a divine, a philosopher, and what not, and my doctrine had a sanction I could not have given to it." He knew that friend and foe were aware that philosophy and divinity were not his strength, and he wished to obtain a fictitious authority for his work. He said to Caryll, March 8, 1733, "It is attributed, I think with reason, to a divine," and the poet had probably circulated the report he affected to believe. "I perceive the divines have no objection to it," he wrote again on March 20, "though now it is agreed not to be written by one,—Dr. Croxall, Dr. Secker, and some others having solemnly denied it." The first reports decided the popular judgment. The orthodoxy of the poem was taken upon trust, and when Pope owned the work in 1734, no one cared to commence a fresh inquisition.

An infidel who hated divines and divinity with all his heart, had dictated the doctrines of the Essay on Man. "He mentioned then, and at several other times," says Spence, in his record of Pope's conversation during the years 1734-36, "how much, or rather how wholly he was obliged to Lord Bolingbroke for the thoughts and reasonings in his moral work; and once in particular said, that beside their frequent talking over that subject together, he had received, I think, seven or eight sheets from Lord Bolingbroke in relation to it (as I apprehended by way of letters), both to direct the plan in general, and to supply the matter for the particular epistles."[748] Pope frankly informed the world, in the Essay itself, that he echoed the lessons of Bolingbroke, who was his "guide and philosopher,"—the "master of the poet and the song." The prose sketch of the "master" was seen by Lord Bathurst at the time, and he testified to Warton and Blair from personal knowledge, that Pope versified the arguments set down for him by Bolingbroke.

Warburton reversed the parts. The "seven or eight sheets," which contained Bolingbroke's prose draught of the Essay on Man, have not been preserved in their original form, and he did not reduce his published philosophy to writing till after the poem was commenced. "If," said Warburton, in allusion to the latter circumstance, "you will take his lordship's word, or, indeed, attend to his argument, you will find that Pope was so far from putting his prose into verse that he has put Pope's verse into prose."[749] But when Bolingbroke mentioned that the Essay on Man was begun before his published disquisitions were committed to paper, he added that they were "nothing more than repetitions of conversations" with Pope.[750] This statement Warburton was dishonest enough to suppress, and deliberately turned a half truth into a falsehood. The ungarbled expressions of Bolingbroke confirm the assurances of Pope and Bathurst, that he was the principal author of the philosophy in the Essay on Man. Warburton could not keep to his misrepresentation. When it was convenient for his purpose he changed his story, and Pope became "a pupil who had to be reasoned out of Bolingbroke's hands,"—a dupe who adopted Bolingbroke's insidious doctrines without perceiving the infidelity, and who had to thank his deliverer that "the poem was put on the side of religion."[751]

Mrs. Mallet told General Grimouard that Pope, Bolingbroke, and their friends, who frequented her house, were "a society of pure deists."[752] Bolingbroke was more of an infidel than Pope, for though he admitted that a future state could not be disproved, he laboured passionately to discredit the arguments in its favour. Pope held to the immortality of the soul. "He was a deist," says Lord Chesterfield, "believing in a future state; this he has often owned himself to me."[753] He frequently avowed his deism to Lyttelton, and acquiesced in the deistical interpretations which the Richardsons put on the Essay on Man. Revelation he rejected entirely. Lord Chesterfield relates that he once saw a bible on his table, and adds, "As I knew his way of thinking upon that book, I asked him jocosely if he was going to write an answer to it?" The evidence that he had renounced Christianity comes to us from various independent sources, and some of the witnesses are above the suspicion of misunderstanding or misrepresenting him.

One of the articles of Bolingbroke's deistical creed is said by Warburton to have been concealed from Pope. "A few days before his death," says Warburton, in the statement he drew up for Ruffhead, "he would be carried to London to dine with Mr. Murray in Lincoln's Inn Fields, whom he loved with the fondness of a father. He was solicitous that Lord Bolingbroke and Mr. Warburton should be of the party. Some time before Mr. Warburton being with Mr. Pope at Twickenham, Mr. Hooke came in, and told us he had supped the night before at Battersea with Lord Bolingbroke, when his lordship in conversation advanced the strangest notions concerning the moral attributes of the Deity, which amounted to an express denial of them. This account gave Mr. Pope much uneasiness, and he told Mr. Hooke with much peevish heat that he was sure he was mistaken. The other replied as warmly that he thought he had sense enough not to mistake a man who spoke plainly, and in a language he understood. Here the matter dropped. But Mr. Pope was not easy till he had seen Lord Bolingbroke, and told him what Mr. Hooke said of a late conversation. Lord Bolingbroke assured him that Mr. Hooke misunderstood him. This assurance Mr. Pope with great pleasure acquainted Mr. Warburton with the next time he saw him. But Lord Bolingbroke and Mr. Pope were both so full of this matter that at this dinner at Mr. Murray's, the conversation, amongst other things, naturally turned on this subject, when, from a very suspicious remark of his lordship, Mr. Warburton took occasion to speak of the clearness of our notions concerning the moral attributes. This occasioned some debate, which ended in some warmth on his lordship's side. This anecdote is not improper to be told in vindication of Mr. Pope's religious sentiments, and the reflections on Mr. Warburton, as if he had not attacked his lordship's impiety till after his death."[754] Warburton had previously told the story in his View of Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophy, and there he related that Bolingbroke "denied God's moral attributes as they are commonly understood."[755] In the narrative he wrote for Ruffhead, Warburton reports Hooke to have said, that Bolingbroke's "notions concerning the moral attributes amounted to an express denial of them."[756] The first statement Bolingbroke would have allowed to be correct; the second he would have repudiated. The two versions are treated by Warburton as one, and his charge against Bolingbroke, and his "vindication of Mr. Pope's religious sentiments," are based upon this presumed identity of propositions which were quite distinct to Pope and Bolingbroke.

Bolingbroke's views on the moral attributes of the Deity were the result of his mania to get rid of the arguments for a future state. Virtue is frequently oppressed and suffering in this world, and vice prosperous; the wicked defraud, supplant, and persecute the upright; and in manifold ways the felicities of life are not proportioned to the behaviour of men. A righteous Deity, we may be sure, would not ordain a constitution of things in which the good should repeatedly fare worse than the bad, often in consequence of their persistence in goodness, and then perish unrewarded in the midst of their self-denial. The inference is plain that they will be finally compensated in a kingdom to come. The struggle between sin and rectitude in good men continues all their days, and when the battle has been fought out, and the victory won, they are removed from the world. It is incredible that a benevolent ruler should set us to maintain a painful conflict with evil, and when we are disciplined to holiness should consign us to annihilation. The hope that well-doing will not go unrewarded, the apprehension that wickedness will not go unpunished, are sentiments engrained in the heart of man, and we may be confident that the source of all truth would not direct us to govern our conduct by false anticipations. The supposition that there is no future life is therefore inconsistent with the moral attributes of God, and to avoid this deduction Bolingbroke took up the theory of one of the worst class of deists, and contended that the moral attributes of the Creator were not the same as in our ideas, and could not be judged by our notions. He said he "ascribed all conceivable perfections to God," and that he was as "far from denying his justice and goodness as his wisdom and power," but insisted that his justice and goodness differed from ours in kind as well as in degree.[757] Wherever this hypothesis was brought in, the epithets "just and good" either ceased to have any meaning for us, or they meant exactly the reverse of "just and good." The object of the theory was, indeed, to set up the maxim that conduct which would be thought immoral among men might be the morality of God. Bolingbroke's philosophic vision was limited to a single point at a time. He abounds in astounding contradictions from his inability to keep his most emphatic principles before his mind, and he might be answered, without a word of comment, by ranging in parallel columns the passages of his writings which are mutually destructive. His hypothesis on the moral attributes of the Deity shared the usual fate of his dogmas. He denounced the doctrine of predestination, and called it "blasphemous," "impious," "devilish," because it was "scandalously repugnant to our ideas of God's moral perfections," and supposed "a God such as no one could acknowledge."[758] The moment he had to deal with an opinion he disliked, he thought it impious to imagine that the morality of God was not in conformity with our ideas, and he loudly appealed to the immutability of those innate moral convictions which alike defy the corrupt morality of libertines who labour to justify evil, and the artificial morality of metaphysicians who strive to prop up fanciful systems.

Warburton might fairly argue, that the theory which maintained that the morality of the Deity was radically different in kind from the moral conceptions of men, "amounted to an express denial of God's moral attributes." He was not entitled to charge upon Bolingbroke an inference he had vehemently disclaimed in his writings, and which was so far from seeming necessary to all pious thinkers that some distinguished christian divines had held the obnoxious hypothesis. No two of them might have been of a mind in the application of a principle the limits of which they could none of them pretend to define, but they would all have concurred with Bolingbroke that to deny the moral attributes of God, and to assert that they were not the same as in our ideas, were distinct propositions. The false turn which Warburton gave to his story is clear from the sequel of his narrative. Pope brought him and Bolingbroke together. The philosopher and his pupil, full of Hooke's accusation, introduced the subject of their own accord. Bolingbroke advanced opinions on the moral attributes which Warburton combated, and the debate ended, as it began, in a total disagreement. The views which Bolingbroke volunteered could not, for shame, be those which he had just disclaimed to Pope, and they were notwithstanding quite unorthodox in the estimation of Warburton. The case is simple. Bolingbroke protested to Pope, what he had protested all along, that he did not deny the moral attributes of God, and he maintained against Warburton in Pope's presence, what he had all along avowed, that they were not the same as in our ideas.

There is more, and conclusive evidence, that Bolingbroke had not concealed his hypothesis from Pope. The incidents narrated by Warburton occurred a few days before the poet's death. The philosophical papers of Bolingbroke were "all communicated to him in scraps as they were occasionally written,"[759] and the whole must already have passed through his hands. In these disquisitions Bolingbroke enforced his view of the divine attributes with tedious diffuseness, incessant reiteration, and unmeasured warmth. No opinion is brought out into stronger relief. A glance at the manuscript must have revealed the hypothesis to Pope, and the Essay on Man proves that he had actually adopted it. All who believed that justice, goodness, and truth were immutable, thought that our primary duty was to contemplate them in the Deity, and endeavour to imitate his perfections. Pope followed Bolingbroke in rejecting the idea. Man, he said, could "just find a God" and nothing more; consequently man was to be the only study of man.[760] Master and pupil agreed that every perfection was to be ascribed to God, and that he was to be loved, worshipped, and obeyed. But the pupil, like the master, held that "God did not show his own nature in his laws, because though they proceed from the divine intelligence they are adapted to the human,"[761] and the last line of the Essay on Man, the emphatic summary of a leading article in Pope's creed, is that "all our knowledge is ourselves to know."

In a subsequent passage Warburton extended his assertion, and alleged that Bolingbroke concealed the whole purpose of his theology from Pope. "The poet," says Warburton, "directs his argument against atheists and libertines in support of religion; the philosopher against divines in support of naturalism. But his lordship thought fit to keep this a secret from his friend as well as from the public."[762] The poet and the philosopher were both deists. The philosopher, Warburton tells us, communicated his principles to associates "who gave him to understand how much they detested them."[763] The poet professed deism before Chesterfield, Lyttelton, the Richardsons and the Mallets. Yet Warburton would have us believe that Bolingbroke disclosed his infidelity to unsympathising friends, and kept it a secret from his chief philosophical intimate, who frankly avowed his own deism in the Bolingbroke circle. The statement, incredible in itself, is opposed to the positive testimony of Bolingbroke when he says that all his written opinions were only the record of his conversations with Pope, and is even contradicted by the unconscious testimony of Warburton. He tells us that when Pope took refuge under his shield the circumstance which most exasperated Bolingbroke was that "he saw a great number of lines appear which, out of complaisance, had been struck out of the MS., and which, at the commentator's request, being now restored to their places, no longer left the religious sentiments of the poet equivocal."[764] The restored lines which modified any "religious sentiment" were barely half a dozen, and were confined to the single tenet of a future state. When Pope allowed his belief in a future state to seem "equivocal, out of complaisance" to his "guide," the infidelity of Bolingbroke could not have been unknown to him.

Still the plea of Warburton remains, that Bolingbroke was for deism and Pope for Christianity. Bolingbroke, says Warburton, argued for natural religion in opposition to revealed; Pope for revealed religion as a necessary supplement to natural. Warburton refuted his own position in the attempt to establish it. He appealed to three passages in the Essay on Man. The first, which he calls the chief, is Epist. ii. ver. 149-160, where Pope terms "reason a weak queen," which obeys the ruling passion. "The poet," says Warburton, "leaves reason unrelieved. What is this but an intimation that we ought to seek for a cure in that religion, which only dares profess to give it?"[765] The poet, on the contrary, immediately proceeds to show how reason can "rectify" the ruling passion, and finally concludes, ver. 197, that "reason the bias turns to good from ill." He insists that there is not a virtue under heaven which "pride" or "shame," rectified by reason, will not produce, ver. 193, and he informs us, ver. 183, that they are the "surest virtues" known to man. The second passage is Epist. iii. ver. 287, where, "speaking," says Warburton, "of the great restorers of the religion of nature, the poet intimates that they could only draw God's shadow, not his image:

as reverencing that truth which telleth us this discovery was reserved for the 'glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God.'"[766] Pope was careful to show in his poem that his meaning was the reverse of what Warburton pretends. He conceives that God's image was hidden from our view, and that man, not God, was our proper study:

He did not believe that the religion of nature, in this particular, was under any disadvantage, for he said, Epist. iii. ver. 148, that "the state of nature was the reign of God," and to "relume the ancient light" was, to his apprehension, the perfection of theology. The third passage is Epist. iv. 341-344, where Pope says, that "hope lengthened on to faith pours the bliss that fills up all the mind." "But natural religion," says Warburton, "never lengthened hope on to faith, nor did any religion, but the christian, ever conceive that faith could fill the mind with happiness."[767] Pope was of a different opinion. Hope and faith, according to his creed, and that of many deists, were part of the religion of nature.[768] He could not think otherwise when he "was a deist believing in a future state," and he was so far from supposing that the christian's faith had any superiority over the deist's in filling the mind with bliss, that all who "fought for modes of faith" were, in his estimation, "graceless zealots."[769] The searching acumen of Warburton, who never had his equal in forcing false meanings from his text, could not discover another allusion to christianity. His interpretations, strained at best, are directly opposed to the context, and this failure to detect one word which could honestly support his construction, leaves no doubt that the Essay on Man was intended for a system of natural religion to the exclusion of revealed.

The poet and his "guide" agreed in repudiating christianity. They differed on the question of a future state, but Pope, while rejecting Bolingbroke's conclusion, adopted his premises. "The fourth epistle he is now intent upon," wrote Bolingbroke to Swift, Aug. 2, 1731. "It is a noble subject. He pleads the cause of God, I use Seneca's expression, against that famous charge which atheists in all ages have brought, the supposed unequal dispensations of Providence,—a charge which I cannot heartily forgive your divines for admitting. You admit it, indeed, for an extreme good purpose, and you build on this admission the necessity of a future state of rewards and punishments. But what if you should find that this future state will not account, in opposition to the atheist, for God's justice in the present state which you give up? Would it not have been better to defend God's justice in this world, against these daring men, by irrefragable reasons, and to have rested the proof of the other point on revelation? You will not understand by what I have said that Pope will go so deep into the argument, or carry it so far as I have hinted." To rest the proof of a future state on revelation, was in Bolingbroke's estimation to build upon a fable. To abandon the proof from reason was therefore with him to relinquish the doctrine. Pope, who had accepted the theory that the justice of God could not be judged by our ideas, embraced the second and superfluous paradox, that the dispensations of God in this world were never unequal. On either ground, said Bolingbroke, the justice of God did not require a future state. The poet had rejected the witness of revelation to the immortality of the soul, and, under the pretext of "pleading the cause of God against atheists," his "guide" had persuaded him to give up the popular proof from reason. He stopped short of the inference that reason did not countenance a future state, or, in Bolingbroke's phrase, "he did not go so deep into the argument." His "guide" laughed at his inconsequence, and "could not," says Warburton, "forbear making the poet, then alive and at his devotion, the frequent topic of his ridicule amongst their common acquaintance as a man who understood nothing of his own principles, nor saw to what they naturally tended."[770]

Bolingbroke was not entitled to ridicule Pope. The docile pupil was not more blind to the reach of the principles instilled into him than was the arrogant master who imposed them. He said the notion that a future world could be essential to vindicate this world was not only needless, but blasphemous. He was never weary of railing at the impiety of the doctrine, and he pretended that the divines who held it "renounced God as much as the rankest of the atheistical tribe."[771] He did not see that the alleged impiety was the identical principle he adopted for the foundation of his philosophy, when, admitting the evils on our globe, he contended that they were linked to a larger scheme which would explain and justify them. "The universe," he said, "is an immense aggregate of systems. Atheists and divines cannot, or will not conceive, that the seeming imperfection of the parts is necessary to the real perfection of the whole."[772] He wronged the divines. They could, and did "conceive that the fitness of the particular portions of a scheme must depend upon their relation to the entire plan," and it was precisely because they argued that the justice of God in this world would be incomprehensible unless we extended our view to the world to come, that Bolingbroke charged them with accusing the Deity of injustice, and ranked them with atheists. The incapacity to understand his own principles could not be carried further.

Pope did not intend to proclaim openly to the world the deism he disclosed to his sceptical companions. "I know," wrote Bolingbroke, "your precaution enough to know that you will screen yourself against any direct charge of heterodoxy."[773] His plan was to put forth a scheme of natural religion without repudiating christianity in terms, that he might be able to give his poem any interpretation he pleased. He soon manifested his double design. Before he avowed himself the author of the Essay on Man, he was anxious that Caryll should be convinced of its orthodoxy. "Out of complaisance" to Bolingbroke, he had left undecided the question of the immortality of the soul:

He feared that this dubious language would be distasteful to Caryll, and thus wrote to him on March 8, 1733. "The town is now very full of a new poem, entitled an Essay on Man. It has merit, in my opinion, but not so much as they give it. At least, it is incorrect, and has some inaccuracies in the expressions,—one or two of an unhappy kind, for they may cause the author's sense to be turned, contrary to what I think his intention, a little unorthodoxically. Nothing is so plain, as that he quits his proper subject, this present world, to assert his belief of a future state, and, yet there is an if instead of a since that would overthrow his meaning."[774] Pope several times reprinted the poem with corrections, but never altered the word which misrepresented his creed on the question whether death was annihilation or immortality. He had a public version, which he adopted "out of complaisance to Bolingbroke," overborne by his showy rhetoric and imperious dogmatism, and a private version for his pious friend, to whom he professed that his conditional language was an "inaccuracy of expression which overthrew his meaning."

Pope's private profession of his belief in a future state was his real conviction. He proceeded to belie his true opinions, by standing up for the christianity of the Essay on Man. "The author," he says, "uses the words 'God the soul of the world,' which, at the first glance, may be taken for heathenism, while his whole paragraph proves him quite christian in his system, from man up to seraphim." Caryll was not convinced, and on October 23 Pope wrote to reassure him. "I believe the author of the Essay on Man will end his poem in such a manner as will satisfy your scruple. I think it impossible for him, with any congruity to his confined and strictly philosophical subject, to mention our Saviour directly; but he may magnify the christian doctrine as the perfection of all moral; nay, and even, I fancy, quote the very words of the Gospel precept, that includes all the law and the precepts, Thou shalt love God above all things, &c., and I conclude that will remove all possible occasion of scandal." He wrote again to the same effect on January 1, 1734:—"To the best of my judgment the author shows himself a christian at last in the assertion, that all earthly happiness, as well as future felicity, depends upon the doctrine of the Gospel,—love of God and man,—and that the whole aim of our being is to attain happiness here and hereafter by the practice of universal charity to man, and entire resignation to God. More particular than this he could not be with any regard to the subject, or manner in which he treated it." From the next letter of the poet, on February 28, it would appear that the "scruple" of Caryll was removed, influenced, perhaps, by the discovery that the work was Pope's own production. "Your candid opinion," says Pope, "not only on the Essay on Man, but its author, pleases me truly. I think verily he is as honest, and as religious a man as myself, and one that will never forfeit justly your kind character of him. It is not directly owned, and I do assure you never was whilst you were kept in ignorance of it."[775] The explanations which satisfied Caryll should have increased his suspicions, for Pope's language was plainly evasive. He rested the whole of his christianity on the doctrines which were held by a large class of deists. He neither avowed his faith in Christ, nor declared his belief that the Gospels were a revelation from God. He had drawn upon Wollaston's admirable work, The Religion of Nature Delineated, and there he had seen how inevitably a christian, who presses the arguments for natural religion, must sometimes refer to the fuller evidence of Scripture, and adopt a tone which would make it impossible that he could be mistaken for a deist. With this model under his eyes, and with the professed desire "to show himself a christian," and "remove all possible occasion of scandal," the ingenuity of the poet was insufficient to devise a single phrase which the majority of English deists would not have subscribed. Even the bare term "christian," which he flourished before Caryll, did not appear in the poem. He kept the word for the ear of the simple country squire, and imposed upon him by the transparent artifice of privately calling the doctrines of deism christianity. The "address," which he told Spence he had "written to our Saviour," would not have contributed to vindicate his orthodoxy, as we may judge from his statement, that it was "imitated from Lucretius's compliment to Epicurus, and omitted by the advice of Berkeley."[776] The application to our Lord of the compliment to Epicurus must have been shocking to Berkeley, and could never have entered into the mind of any one who believed that Jesus Christ was "God manifest in the flesh."

A few persons, not in the secret of Pope's deism, had the discernment to share the first impressions of Caryll. The celebrated David Hartley is said, by his son, to have "regarded the Essay on Man as tending to insinuate that the Divine revelation of the christian religion was superfluous," and to substitute for it "the plagiarisms of modern ethics from christian doctrines." But readers in general were more attentive to the poetry than the philosophy, and did not detect the lurking heresies of the poem till Crousaz published his Examen de l'Essai de Mr. Pope in 1737, which he enforced by his more elaborate Commentaire in the following year. "Mr. Pope's name, and not his own, spread them," says Dr. Middleton, "into everybody's hands."[777] Hitherto the poet had not been far wrong in his calculation, that his deism would pass unsuspected, because not directly professed, and the tenets he taught explicitly he believed to be so unanswerable, that, in a suppressed passage of the fourth Epistle, he raised a shout of triumph over the "scattered fools who would fly trembling from the heels" of his Pegasus. The comments of Crousaz, often founded upon mistranslations and misconceptions, laid bare sufficient sophistries, inconsistencies, and irreligion, to open the eyes of the public. Pope's confidence immediately changed to fright. "He took terror," says Richardson, "about the clergy, and Warburton himself, at the general alarm of its fatalism and deistical tendency." The poet had a dread of incurring the obloquy of any class or profession. "I know," Bolingbroke wrote to him, "how desirous you are to keep fair with orders, whatever liberties you take with particular men,"[778] and he confessed that this motive "was what chiefly stopped his going on" with his ethical scheme. "I could not have said what I would have said without provoking every church on the face of the earth, and I did not care for living always in boiling water."[779] He had never intended at any time to risk an attack from the clergy, and when the danger came unexpectedly, it was he himself that "fled trembling from the heels" of threatening foes.

His special fear of Warburton was not without cause. Warburton was the friend of Pope's enemies, Concannen and Theobald, and held Pope cheap both as a man and a poet. Of the poet he wrote to Concannen, Jan. 2, 1727, that Pope "borrowed for want of genius."[780] Of the man he wrote to Hurd, Jan. 2, 1757, "Till his letters were published, I had as indifferent an opinion of his morals as the gentlemen of the Dunciad pretended to have. Mr. Pope knew this, and had the justice to own to me that I fairly followed appearances when I thought well of them, and ill of him."[781] The Essay on Man was especially obnoxious to Warburton. He said that it was collected "from the worst passages of the worst authors,"[782] and that the doctrines were "rank atheism."[783] He did not confine his denunciation of the poem to conversation, but refuted its vicious principles in some formal dissertations which he read at a literary club in Newark.[784] The Dunciad faction, we may be certain, were careful to circulate his asperities, and Pope assisted the malignity of the Dunces by keeping his ears open to all the ill they reported. Warburton had now shown his quality by his treatise on the Alliance between Church and State, and the first books of the Divine Legation. The poet, who was quailing under the assaults of Crousaz, might well be alarmed lest a more formidable enemy should speak to the world the criticisms he propagated in conversation, and in his addresses to the Newark Club. In theology and metaphysics he was far beyond Pope's "philosopher and guide." He was even more dictatorial and abusive, more over-bearing and contemptuous, more ingenious in his sophistries, and not more scrupulous in the use of his weapons. His moral obliquities, which have half-ruined his reputation with posterity, were of a kind to increase the apprehensions of Pope, who must have submitted in helpless silence to the sweeping, haughty, scornful exposure of the Essay on Man.

When the storm had begun to burst on the defenceless head of Pope, Warburton saw reason to go over to his side, and in December, 1738, commenced an anonymous reply to Crousaz in a monthly publication called the Works of the Learned. An equitable judgment was not among the merits of Warburton. His dogmatic violence could not brook the least concession to an opposing view, and he was always in extremes. While he herded with "the gentlemen of the Dunciad" he was uncompromising in his censure of Pope. He suddenly transferred his advocacy to the enemy, and indulged, with a daring defiance of consistency, in a wild exaggeration of Pope's powers, and a hardy denial of his errors and defects. The man who "borrowed for want of genius," became "the last of the poetic line amongst us, on whom, the large patrimony of his whole race is devolved."[785] He had not only inherited the entire gifts of all poets of all times, "he was the maker of a new species of the sublime, so new that we have yet no name for it, though of a nature distinct from every other known beauty of poetry." "The two great perfections in works of genius," Warburton goes on, "are wit and sublimity. Many writers have been witty; some have been sublime; and a few have even possessed both these qualities separately. But none, that I know of, besides our poet, hath had the art to incorporate them. This seems to be the last effort of the imagination to poetical perfection."[786] A single example of Pope's witty sublime is specified by Warburton,—the comparison of Newton to the ape. Unfortunately, this instance of the "new species of the sublime,"—"so new that we have yet no name for it,"—was copied from a Latin poet of the sixteenth century, and was a false conceit without a spark of sublimity or wit.

With the change in his view of Pope's genius, there was a complete revolution in Warburton's estimate of the Essay on Man. The work ceased to be made up "from the worst passages of the worst authors." A superlative originality took the place of ignorant plagiarism, and "he uttered heavy menaces," says Bishop Law, "against those who presumed to insinuate that Pope borrowed anything from any man whatsoever."[787] The "rank atheism," in like manner, was converted into the purest orthodoxy, and every line breathed forth piety and sound philosophy. "He follows truth," said his advocate, "uniformly throughout."[788] The strain of sickening adulation in which Warburton conveyed his newly-born admiration showed that arrogance was not more congenial to his nature than servility, and both were rivalled by the effrontery with which he spoke of those who shared his old opinions. He and the "gentlemen of the Dunciad" had agreed in thinking ill of Pope's morals, but the conviction was genuine with Warburton, and "pretence" in them.[789] He declaimed against the "rank atheism" of the Essay on Man, but the freethinkers who had believed that Pope was of "their party" had "affectedly embraced the delusion."[790]

Warburton's accusations of insincerity were the more unblushing that his recantation was partly feigned. When he published his defence of three epistles of the Essay on Man, he said that Pope's "strong and delicate reasoning ran equally through all" the poem, but that "the turn of the fourth epistle being more popular seemed to need no comment."[791] His real motive for passing over the fourth epistle was very different, and comes out in a letter to Dr. Birch, Oct. 25, 1739. "I have been looking over, inter nos, the fourth epistle of the Essay on Man; for I have a great inclination to make an analysis of that to complete the whole. I find this part of my defence of Mr. Pope as difficult as a confutation of Mr. Crousaz's nonsense, and a detection of the translator's blunders, are easy. I do not know whether I can do it to my mind, or whether I shall do it at all, so beg you would keep it secret."[792] He left the fourth epistle undefended because it was almost beyond his powers of sophistry to devise a defence, and professed to the world that "the strong and delicate reasoning was too popular to need a comment." Having undertaken the "difficult" task, he kept up the dissimulation, justified every doctrine the epistle contained, and lauded it, in common with the rest of the work, for its "exact reasoning," and for "a precision, force, and closeness of connection rarely to be met with, even in the most formal treatises of philosophy."[793] His want of sincerity would be self-evident without the contradiction between his confidential confessions, and his public praise. No one, with his knowledge of philosophical divinity, could possibly have magnified Pope in good faith for the qualities in which he was deplorably deficient.

Dodsley, the bookseller, was present at the first interview between Pope and Warburton, and was astonished at the compliments the poet paid to his commentator.[794] There was no occasion for astonishment. Pope's despiser had turned idolater, "the gentlemen of the Dunciad" had lost their ablest ally, the thrust of Crousaz had been parried, and the champion was the dreaded man who was expected to be a fatal foe. The sensitive novice in philosophy, who was incompetent to fight, and could not endure defeat, was relieved from future as well as present fears. He would not henceforward be answerable to theological and metaphysical assailants. Warburton had assumed the responsibility of the poem, and his irascible, pugnacious vanity was a pledge that he would defend his certificate of orthodoxy with his usual violence, disdain, and ability. The relief to the mind of the anxious poet was immense, and fully explains his headlong gratitude. He immediately renounced his deistical interpretation of the Essay, and adopted all the views of his thundering advocate. "I know I meant just what you explain," wrote the obsequious poet, April 11, 1739, "but I did not explain my own meaning as well as you." He was too eager to live under Warburton's protection to retain a particle of independence. No matter how incredible might be the interpretations which his commentator often fathered upon him, he hastened to accept every one of them without reserve. The public were not deluded, and a letter of Dr. Middleton to Warburton, Jan. 7, 1740, is a fair specimen, expressed in friendly terms, of the common opinion. "You have evinced the orthodoxy of Mr. Pope's principles, but, like the old commentators on his Homer, will be thought, perhaps, in some places to have provided a meaning for him that he himself never dreamed of. However, if you did not find him a philosopher, you will make him one, for he will be wise enough to take the benefit of your reading, and make his future essays more clear and consistent." Pope's moral laxity was not the only cause of the facility with which he changed his creed. The shallowness of his convictions had a share in the event. He had no real insight into theology, natural or revealed. He rejected christianity because his associates sneered at it, and because the age was irreligious. Ignorant of the right road, he was sometimes persuaded that all roads led to a common goal, or he adopted the road which was pointed out to him by his guides. The Essay on Man would never have been written unless Bolingbroke had dictated the subject, and supplied the materials, and Pope was subdued by his dogmatism rather than enlightened by his arguments. The speculations the poet versified had not proceeded from his own mind; he believed as he was prompted; and he had not any rooted convictions to sacrifice when a second dogmatist provided him with more convenient opinions.

Pope would have been glad "to dwell in ambiguities for ever." In accepting the advocacy of Warburton he was obliged to abandon his equivocal attitude, and disavow the deistical creed. "The infidels and libertines," Warburton wrote to Dr. Stukeley, January 1, 1740, "prided themselves in thinking Mr. Pope of their party. I thought it of use to religion to show so noble a genius was not; and I can have the pleasure of telling you (and have Mr. Pope's own authority for it), that he is not."[795] His chief difficulty must have been to cast off his allegiance to his "philosopher and guide, the master of the poet and the song." But his reputation was at stake, and he did not hesitate. His anxiety to disclaim all sympathy with the theology of the teacher who had furnished the arguments of his poem was shown by one of his habitual frauds. He published, in 1741, his correspondence with Swift, and in the printed letter of December, 1725, he says, "Lord B. is above trifling; when he writes of anything in this world, he is more than mortal: if ever he trifles it must be when he turns a divine." A copy of the letter is among the Oxford papers at Longleat, and there we find that the words he really used were, "Lord B. is above trifling; he is grown a great divine." Pope reversed the language of the original passage that he might seem to the world to have contemned the divinity of Bolingbroke long before the Essay on Man appeared. The fraud had the intended effect with Pope's friends. Lord Mansfield inferred from the fabricated version that "Pope not only condemned but despised the futility of Bolingbroke's reasoning against revelation;" and Warburton quoted the sentence for an evidence of Pope's opinion "that no subject but religion could have sunk his lordship so far below the class of reputable authors."[796] Bolingbroke, ignorant of the trick, remained upon cordial terms with Pope, and did not outwardly resent his defection. The discarded master had a double motive for his forbearance. No man was more vulnerable, and he would have feared to provoke the malignity of the satirist. He was anxious in his life-time to conceal his infidelity from the outer world, and he could not expose the inconsistencies of the poet without revealing his own unbelief. "I have been a martyr of faction in politics," he once wrote to Pope, "and have no vocation to be so in philosophy."[797] Inwardly he was deeply mortified that "the song" he had inspired should be wrested to a meaning he disowned, that his admiring scholar should bow down no longer to his sceptical sophistries, and that the idol who supplanted him should belong to that priestly order of which he never spoke without scorn. His suppressed indignation, inflamed by fresh offences, broke out after Pope was dead.

When the orthodox meaning imposed on the Essay had once been accepted by the poet, he was anxious to use the new interpretation to silence or conciliate his opponents abroad. He immediately got Warburton's reply to Crousaz translated into French,[798] and employed Ramsay, a Scotchman, who had been Fénelon's secretary, to write to Louis Racine, April 28, 1742, and assure him that he was mistaken when he said in his poem La Religion,

Ramsay told the French poet that Pope did not think all was "right" in mankind. He believed them fallen from their primitive condition, and his life-long faith was evidence of his real convictions. "He is a very good catholic," says his apologist, "and has always kept to the religion of his forefathers in a country where he had many temptations to abandon it." A letter addressed by Pope to Racine in the following September upholds the statement that he was a "good catholic," for he declares that his views are "conformable to those of Pascal and Fénelon, the latter of whom," says he, "I would most readily imitate in submitting all my opinions to the decision of the church."[799] His sincerity may be doubted when he professed his readiness to accept the decisions of the romish church for a law. The Essay on Man was already completed, or far advanced, when Bolingbroke wrote to him, "I do not expect from you the answer I should be sure to have from persons more orthodox than I know you to be in the faith of the pretended catholic church. Such persons would insist on the authority of the church."[800] Pope could not, indeed, be a romanist when he had not yet emerged from deism, and he was not a romanist some twelvemonth after his letter to Racine, when he said to Warburton, "that he was convinced that the church of Rome had all the marks of the anti-christian power predicted in the New Testament." Warburton enquired why he did not publicly renounce a church he allowed to be corrupt. "There were," he replied, "but two reasons that kept him from it: one, that the doing so would make him a great many enemies, and the other that it would do nobody else any good."[801] Either his persuasion that an unconditional submission was due to the decisions of the romish church, must have been a transitory belief which commenced a short time before his letter to Racine, and ceased a short time after, or else he used deceptive language in his letter that he might convince Racine of his orthodoxy. His explanations did not alter the French poet's opinion on the infidel tendency of the Essay on Man. "After the letter he wrote me," says Racine, "I am far from suspecting him of designing to preach deism, but I am obliged to confess that we seem to detect it in the midst of all his abstract reasonings, and that it even presents itself so naturally that we may attribute to it the rapid spread of the poem in France."[802]

Pope's letter was forwarded to Racine by Ramsay, who accompanied it with a second letter of his own, in which he again dwelt on his friend's continuous and disinterested adherence to romanism. "I am assured that a princess who admired his works, wished, when she ruled over England, to induce him not to abandon, but to dissimulate his religion. She was desirous of procuring him considerable appointments, and promised that the customary oaths should be dispensed with. He refused these offers with immoveable firmness. Such a sacrifice was not the act of a sceptic or a deist."[803] Ramsay does not say that he received the anecdote from Pope, but he was writing in concert with him, and on his behalf, and there is a strong presumption that the poet had sanctioned the fable. To dispense with the customary oaths would have been a breach of the act of settlement, and the assertion of the power would have cost Anne her crown, and Pope his office. This immense and abortive sacrifice was to have been made in the interests of a man whom the queen had never seen, who was politically insignificant, and whose moderate wants she could have supplied from her private purse. The ludicrous invention, which could only pass current with a foreigner ignorant of the English constitution, was a magnified version of Lord Oxford's hollow talk. "He used often," said Pope, "to express his concern for my continuing incapable of a place, which I could not make myself capable of without giving a great deal of pain to my parents, such pain, indeed, as I would not have given to either of them for all the places he could have bestowed upon me."[804] Lord Oxford, who trusted chiefly to duplicity and petty artifices for obtaining support, was accustomed to amuse every one who came near him with hopes, and evade their fulfilment by paltry excuses. His cheap lamentation that Pope was disqualified for an office is a sad downfall from the magnanimous offer of the Queen to provide him with a place in defiance of law, and at the risk of her throne. If the anecdote had been true, Ramsay's inference that Pope was an orthodox romanist would have been wrong. His reason for not "making himself capable of a place" was the pain his abjuration of romanism would have given his parents. He did not pretend to plead conscience.

The system of philosophy set forth in the poem is now to be considered. Few persons could have been less qualified than Bolingbroke and Pope to write on natural religion. The desultory superficial investigations of Bolingbroke were under the dominion of his passions, and Pope had barely thought upon the subject at all. They both took for their motto a sentence from Foster, a dissenting minister,—"Where mystery begins religion ends,"[805]—and it did not occur to them that no mystery could be greater than the first article of their own deistical creed,—the necessary existence of God. Atheism magnifies the mystery, which is an inherent ingredient in every system, religious or infidel. The least reflection forces this fact upon the mind, and the blindness of Pope and Bolingbroke to a truth which met them at the threshold of their speculations, and recurred at every turn, is not an unjust measure of their general incapacity for religious philosophy.

The Essay on Man was framed on the old and obvious division of ethics, which treated of man in his relation to God, his fellow-creatures, and himself. Pope, who thought it presumption to study God,[806] passed over the first of the three heads, and substituted an epistle on man in relation to the universe. The leading arguments in this opening epistle were taken from the Théodicée of Leibnitz, the Moralists of Shaftesbury, and the Origin of Evil, by Archbishop King. The poet had read the essay of Shaftesbury, and had possibly looked into King; but of Leibnitz he was entirely ignorant. In reply to the charge of having adopted the alleged fatalism of the illustrious German, he wrote to Warburton, Feb. 2, 1739, "It cannot be unpleasant to you to know that I never in my life read a line of Leibnitz, nor understood there was such a term as pre-established harmony till I found it in M. Crousaz's book." Bolingbroke had instructed Pope that Leibnitz was "one of the vainest and most chimerical men that ever got a name in philosophy, and that he was so often unintelligible that no man ought to believe he understood himself."[807] Naturally Pope had not the least suspicion that some of the principal tenets instilled into him by his "guide" were filched without acknowledgment from this vain, chimerical, unintelligible man.

The optimism of Leibnitz has been a thousand times misrepresented, not because his Théodicée is obscure, but because the scoffers had never read the system they decried. He was supposed to have maintained that our little globe, taken separately, was the best which could be conceived, and that all the trials and crimes of men were in their own independent nature a good. Voltaire was among the ignorant, and to refute the doctrine that everything was good, he concocted a licentious tale, in which everything is vice, injustice, and misery. His satire has a double flaw. He gives a false representation of human life, and of the optimism of Leibnitz. The world of Leibnitz is not our earth in its present state, but the universe, unlimited in extent, and eternal in duration. The final purpose of the Deity in his stupendous scheme is the best that can be, and the means are the best for their end. The fitness of the several parts can only be estimated in their relation to the whole, and the whole is not creation at any moment of time, but the evolution of the universe from everlasting to everlasting. It would be folly to judge the evils of the hour in their isolation, when they are incidents in an illimitable plan, and have reference to the greatest ultimate good. To show in detail how all the evils we experience are subservient to the best conceivable scheme of the universe, would require that we should know the infinite design of God, that we should be able to picture the infinity of other possible worlds, and to institute a comparison between these infinite infinities. A morsel of flesh, or a splinter of bone, bears an immeasurably larger proportion to our frame than our existing globe to the existing universe, which is itself but a link in the eternal chain, and yet a person ignorant of the human structure would in vain attempt to explain the purpose and fitness of some diminutive fragment of man.[808]

Leibnitz took for granted, in their greatest latitude, the power, wisdom, and goodness of God. Upon this supposition, Hume, personating the character of a sceptic, allowed that there "might, perhaps, be a plausible solution of the ill phenomena." But the sceptic objects that "the Deity is known to us solely in his productions, that the universe shows only a particular degree of wisdom and goodness, and that we can never be authorised to infer a further degree of these attributes, which would be adding something to the attributes of the cause beyond what appears in the effects."[809] The objection would be sound if the whole series of effects were unfolded to our view. They extend, on the contrary, indefinitely beyond our capacity to follow them, and the question is, whether the defects appertain to the attributes of God, or whether the appearance of imperfection is the consequence of our ignorance. The answer is not doubtful. There is superabundant proof that our globe is framed upon a plan in which animals and things have a mutual dependence. Our globe itself, again, is a portion of a larger system, and we have an irresistible conviction that the boundless universe is the work of one Author, and that a definite purpose pervades the whole. With this first fact we couple a second, that the appropriateness of the details in a complicated contrivance cannot be understood, unless we comprehend the general principle of the contrivance, and the relation of its parts. The optimism of Leibnitz is the only just inference from these facts. A speck of creation is submitted to our examination, and the evidences of power, wisdom, and goodness are vast and overwhelming. Other parts seem defective, as inevitably happens when our knowledge is miserably inadequate; and, in accordance with experience, we conclude that our enormous ignorance is at fault, and not that the superlative workman is inconsistent. The explanation of the optimist is rational, while that of the sceptic involves a gratuitous contradiction, and is wild, improbable, and unsupported.

Hume's spokesman enforces his view by an instance which was the favourite argument of Bolingbroke. "A more impartial distribution of rewards and punishments," says the sceptic, in allusion to a future state, "must proceed from a greater regard to justice and equity."[810] Admit that the justice of God's government on earth is, in a single instance, imperfect, and it follows that the argument for the perfection of His attributes is at an end. The fallacy is in the assumed fact, that a greater regard would be shown to equity, if rewards in this life were exactly proportioned to merits. The chief purpose of the present life is clearly not happiness but excellence. The characters of good men are disciplined and purified here to fit them for happiness hereafter, and the trials which best prepare them for eternal felicity cannot be a deviation from equity. "Every branch," says our Lord, "that beareth fruit, my father purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit,"[811] which is a stronger evidence of fatherly care than an injurious distribution of rewards and punishments on the sceptical plan. Physical evils become a blessing when they are the lasting corrective of sin.

The moral evil itself can in part be explained. The mind and body of human beings, and the world in which we live, have been fixed for us by the Creator. The will alone is free, and it is the will which really constitutes the man. Without freedom of will there could be no morality, any more than a tree is moral when it flourishes, and immoral when it withers. Freedom pre-supposes a power to do wrong, and without this liberty there could be no individual worth. The frailty of man grows out of his supremacy. Warburton denied that there was any force in the explanation, since if "God had only brought those creatures into being who would not have abused their freedom, evil had been prevented without intrenching upon free will."[812] Two principles are here assumed to be indisputable, neither of which are self-evident, or capable of proof. Warburton supposes it to be intuitively certain that a picked race of moral agents, who must be limited in their perfections because they are inferior to God, may all be gifted with an infallible power of defying sin, which for aught we know may be impossible. A christian divine must admit that some of the angels fell, and for anything we can tell the steadfast angels might have sinned without the warning example of their apostate brethren. Warburton further supposes it to be intuitively certain, that if perchance there may be a hierarchy too lofty to have ever erred, the non-existence of the multitudinous lesser beings would be preferable to their existence with an admixture of evil, which is not the sentiment raised in human minds by the contemplation of the living creatures of our globe. On the contrary, the deepest philosophers and simplest peasants are alike lost in admiration at the spectacle, and feel impotent to rise to a fitting height of love and praise. As the latent premises of Warburton are not manifest facts, he has failed to make good his position, that to all appearance God could have framed a better world from which every semblance of evil might have been excluded. The moral nature of man goes far to account for the evil of man, and for his present probation. The comparative innocence of children is lovely, but it is innocence which has not been tried, and when it is tested it fails. The innocence of saints is the innocence which has passed through the terrible experience of sin, which knows the degradation of iniquity, which has fought against it and triumphed, and hence it is the second and acquired innocence which endures. The innocence of Adam in Paradise may have resembled the inexperience of the child, and the only road to permanent victory may be through defeat. Heaven itself may be a place of temptation unless an energy of conquering will has been first developed, and we have grown strong by an inherent homage to righteousness. In our world, at least, felicity is not the securest situation for untried virtue. This is enough to justify to our understandings the state of man upon earth, though much is mysterious in the details from our imperfect knowledge of the ultimate effect upon aggregate humanity of the discipline of life, and our ignorance of the part which our race is to play in the eternal universe.