Note 1012 — AN ESSAY ON MAN, IN FOUR EPISTLES (continued 3)
Reading edition
Matt. x. 29.—Warburton.
Pope, in the MS., had expanded the idea, and added this couplet:
No great, no little; 'tis as much decreed That Virgil's Gnat should die as Cæsar bleed.
It is doubtful whether Virgil was the author of the Culex or Gnat, which, says Mr. Long, "is a kind of Bucolic poem in 413 hexameters, often very obscure." Pope's assertion that there is "no great, no little," is contradicted by the passage in St. Matthew to which Warburton refers. Our Lord there assures us that "we are of more value than many sparrows," and the ruin of a world, with its myriad of sentient beings, must be of infinitely greater moment in the sight of the Deity than the bursting of a bubble. Pope repeats, ver. 279, a statement which is repugnant to reason, to revelation, and to his own system of a scale of beings.