Note 1009 — AN ESSAY ON MAN, IN FOUR EPISTLES (continued 3)
Reading edition
Ed. 1:
If to be perfect in a certain state, What matter here or there, or soon or late? And he that's bless'd to-day as fully so, As who began ten thousand years ago.
Omitted in the subsequent editions.—Pope.
This note appeared, 1735, in vol. 2 of the quarto edition of Pope's Poetical Works. The lines originally followed ver. 98, and when they re-appeared in the text in 1743 they were shifted to their present position. They are especially bad,—elliptical and prosaic in expression, and sophistical in argument. The suffering which matters nothing when it is over is not unimportant while it lasts. A prolonged imprisonment in a noisome dungeon does not cease to be a penalty because the captive will one day be free. The Bible recognises the bitterness of human misery, but teaches that christians are to be reconciled to it on account of the moral purposes it subserves, and the endless felicity which ensues. Pope notes in his MS. that ver. 76 is "reversed from Lucretius on death," and Wakefield quotes the translation of Dryden which Pope copied:
The man as much to all intents is dead Who dies to-day, and will as long be so, As he who died a thousand years ago.