Note 1316 — AN ESSAY ON MAN, IN FOUR EPISTLES (continued 3)
Reading edition
Bolingbroke, Fragment 51: "As our parents loved themselves in us, so we love ourselves in our children."—Wakefield.
Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel:
Our fond begetters who would never die, Love but themselves in their posterity.
The lines from ver. 115 to ver. 124 are varied in the MS.:
Quick with this spirit new-born nature moved, Itself each creature in its species loved; Each sought a pleasure not possessed alone, Each sex desired alike till two were one. This impulse animates; one nature feeds The vital lamp, and swells the genial seeds: All spread their image with like ardour stung, All love themselves, reflected in their young.
Dr. George Campbell remarks, in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, that to talk of creatures loving themselves in their progeny is nonsensical rant. Of many fathers and mothers it would be nearer the truth to say that they love their children almost to the exclusion of themselves. Neither Pope nor Bolingbroke had children, and not having experienced, they misapprehended, the parental feeling.