down to 1864; five into German, coming down to 1874; five into Italian, coming down to 1856; two into Portuguese; one into Polish; two Polyglot; two into Latin verse. Wieland and Voltaire have written poems in imitation of it. Voltaire calls it "the most beautiful, the most useful, the most sublime didactic poem that has ever been written in any language.”1 Marmontel says: "Pope has shown how high poetry can soar on the wings of philosophy." Dugald Stewart declares: "The Essay on Man' is the noblest specimen of philosophical poetry which our language affords; and, with the exception of a very few passages, contains a valuable summary of all that human reason has been able hitherto to advance in justification of the moral government of God." Immanuel Kant used

to quote from it frequently in illustration of his lectures. It appears at first sight strange that such praises should have been extorted from eminent doctors of philosophy by a poem in which the Theism of Leibnitz is combined with the Pantheism of Spinoza, and in which the central principle of the Ruling Passion leads directly to conclusions of blind fatalism!

Nevertheless the apparent inconsistency is easy of explanation. Pope's business as a poet was to persuade, not to convince, and he performed his business with consummate skill. He knew that the philosophical thesis he proposed to establish was distinct enough to give unity to his poetic conception, and like a dexterous orator, he threw his whole strength into the task of ornamenting and illustrating the component parts of his 'Essay.' The reader's attention is thus carried on swiftly from one brilliant passage to another, no time being left to reason for reflecting on the weakness or inconsistency of the argun.ent. We admire now the sublime description of the omnipresence of God in nature; now the fine moral invective against the soaring pride and folly of the human mind; now the pregnant sense of the epigrams:

Voltaire, 'Œuvres,' xii. p. 156. 2 Eléments de Littérature.' Art.

'Epitre.'

Works, vol. vii., p. 183.

"What can ennoble sots, and fools, and cowards?
Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards;"

or the delicate refinement of the illustrations:

"The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine!

Feels at each thread, and lives along the line."

The condensed philosophic aphorisms seem to bear down all scepticism before their pithy positiveness:

"One truth is clear, whatever is, is right."

"Here then we rest:-'the Universal Cause
Acts to one end, but acts by various laws.""
"For forms of government let fools contest;
Whate'er is best administered is best:
For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;
He can't be wrong whose life is in the right."

Nakedly stated, nothing can be more obviously monstrous than the doctrine that God inspires man to do evil in furtherance of his own plans. Yet how specious seems the argument when advanced in such a couplet as

"If plagues and earthquakes break not heaven's design,
Why then a Borgia or a Catiline?"

No one ever, perhaps, seriously believed that men learnt the arts of life by imitating animals, but who is not charmed with the lines —

"Learn of the little nautilus to sail,

Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale."

The simple faith of the poor Indian,' and the sportiveness of the lamb ignorant of his destiny, may not be adequate proofs of the theories they are supposed to establish; yet who thinks of the poverty of the argument as he listens to the melody of the verse in which it is conveyed ?

These qualities will cause the Essay on Man' to be read as long as men care to examine the capacity of the English language for harmonious rhetoric and terse expression. It is

these which have enabled its popularity to survive the decline of the modes of thought which gave it a peculiar interest for the imagination of its earliest readers. When the poem had lost its first novelty, there were some who perceived that its philosophy was open to many of the criticisms of Crousaz; there were others who saw that it could not stand against the ridicule of Voltaire. The Deism, on which it was based gave place in time, as a fashion of thought, first to the scepticism of Hume, and afterwards to the atheism of the French Encyclopædists. On the other hand, even in the first half of the eighteenth century, many men of devout temper, like William Law, author of the Serious Call to a Devout Life,' felt that the strength of Christianity lay in its appeal to the heart; and the plausible arguments of Natural Religion, which had commended themselves to the cold Latitudinarianism of society under George the Second, made no impression on souls touched by the inward and spiritual forces of Methodism. Nevertheless; the subject of the 'Essay' is of universal interest, for though the problem with which it deals is one that can never be solved by reason alone, it is yet one that will always invite solution. The particular solution offered by Pope is unsatisfactory, but perhaps not more so than any other among the crowd of systems which in every age have attracted adherents and believers, while it has at least the merit of introducing the reader to a representation of Man which, restricted as it is, is founded on nice observation and subtle reflection. Form and Art triumph even in the midst of error: a framework of fallacious generalisation gives coherence to the epigrammatic statement of a multitude of individual truths

CHAPTER XIL

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERIOD.

Death of Gay-'First Imitation of Horace-Verses to the Imitator of Horace' and 'Letter to a Doctor of Divinity''Letter to a Noble Lord''Epistle to Arbuthnot'-Death of Pope's Mother and of Arbuthnot.

1733-1735.

POPE's writings fall naturally into two classes; those which were inspired by some motive of fancy or of abstract reflection; and those which had their origin in personal feeling or in the force of circumstances. To the former class belong the 'Pastorals,' 'Windsor Forest,' the Rape of the Lock,' the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,' the 'Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard,' the Essay on Man,' and the Moral Essays'; to the latter the Dunciad,' the Imitations of Horace,' and the Prologue and Epilogue to the Satires.' It is, however, to be observed that both kinds of composition are vividly coloured by the poet's own character, and while in the didactic poems, like the Moral Essays,' there is a strong personal element, in the Satires,' which are mainly the product of personal resentment, the private nature of the master motive is softened and elevated by an atmosphere of generous idealism.

It is noticeable, too, that the Rape of the Lock,' the 'Essay on Man,' and the like, spring out of independent efforts of imagination; but the works produced by necessity or personal feeling form a closely connected series. We have already seen that the Dunciad' was inspired by the attacks made on the poet while engaged on the Translation of Homer and on the edition of Shakespeare; and we now come to

a class of autobiographical and apologetic compositions in prose and verse, which were no less evidently drawn from him by the active retaliatory measures of those who had smarted from the Dunciad.' · Of this description are the

majority of the 'Imitations of Horace,' the Letter to a Noble Lord,' the Versifications of Donne,' the Epistle to Arbuthnot,' and the so-called surreptitious and authentic volumes of the Correspondence. Johnson, indeed, says that "the Imitations of Horace' seem to have been written as relaxations of Pope's genius," but I think that no one can study these poems in the light of our present knowledge without perceiving how entirely they are the fruit of passion and circumstance.

When the first epistle of the Essay on Man' was on the eve of publication an inflammation of the breast suddenly carried off one of the friends to whom Pope was most sincerely attached. Gay had lived with him in close companionship for more than twenty years; and, as often happens with men of a similar temper, his easy and rather feeble amiability, endeared him to the bitter and irritable poet. He died on the 4th of December, 1732, and on the 5th Pope wrote to Swift:

"I shall never see you now, I believe; one of your principal calls to England is at an end. Indeed he was the most amiable by far, his qualities were the gentlest; but I love you as well and as firmly. Would to God the man we had lost had not been so amiable or eo good; but that is a wish for our own sakes, not for his. Sure, if innocence and integrity can deserve happiness, it must be his."

His grief and agitation threw him into a fever, from which as he was recovering, Lord Bolingbroke one day called upon him, and taking up a volume of Horace which was on the table, happened to light upon the first Satire of the Second Book, which, he observed, exactly fitted Pope's case. After he had gone, the poet read it over: in two mornings he had imitated it, and finding his friends pleased with the result, sent it to press within a week. When