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wolds of Yorkshire, mine to the banks of the Thames. And yet I think I have less dependence on others, and others less on me than most men I have ever known; so that I should be a free man. So should a female friend of ours; but Habit is her goddess, I wish I could not say worse-her tyrant: she not only obeys, but suffers under her; and Reason and Friendship plead in vain. Out of hell and out of habit, there is no redemption."

On June 30 Lord Orrery married en secondes noces Margaret Hamilton, daughter of John Hamilton, of Caledon. She is described as "the greatest fortune in the British dominions, and a lady of as many virtues." The bridegroom wrote to Mrs. Cæsar on July 6 that-" Lady Orrery is impatient to see so extraordinary a lady, who, like herself, scorns courts and courtiers, to admire Mr. Pope and the incomparable dean."1

me

your

Pope professed to have given up all hope of getting back his letters from Swift. The dean, forgetting that he had returned any by Lord Orrery, had written that "a great collection of my letters to you are put up and sealed, and in some very safe hand." This slip of the pen proved another weapon in the hands of the poet when he desired to prove that he could not possibly have published the second volume of his "Correspondence." Pope assures Lord Orrery that he shall now leave the matter to chance or Providence with as much temper as he can, which was no particular merit, considering that he had the bulk of his letters in his own hands.

1 From the unpublished MS.

"It

In the course of the autumn Pope had a visit from Allen, who warmly pressed him to come to Bath in the winter, and make Prior Park his headquarters. Pope replied that he would gladly pay a visit to Bath if the Court were not there. has been thrice my fate to be dispossest of my own house, when there was one at Hampton Court, but when the Bath is a private place, such as it was in the Court of King Bladud, I will come and live with you.

The poet explains that he is going to insert his Dialogues "Seventeen Hundred and Thirty-eight into the body of his works, and adds: "I have found a virtue in you more than I certainly knew before, till I had made experiment of it-I mean humility. I must therefore, in justice to my own conscience of it, bear testimony to it-and change the epithet I first gave you of low-born to humble. I shall take care to do you the justice to tell everybody this change was not made at yours, or at any friend's request for you, but my own knowledge you merited it."

CHAPTER LIV

1739

Crousaz and the "Essay on Man"-Warburton's Defence-Letter to Swift-Martha BlountThe Prince and Mr. Lyttelton-The State of the Opposition-Bristol and Widcombe

TH

'HE "Essay on Man" had been translated into French, and attracted a good deal of attention abroad, but the fallacies in the reasoning could hardly escape the notice of Continental readers, who were logically better equipped than their English contemporaries. A Monsieur Crousaz, Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy at the University of Lausanne, wrote an "Examen of Mr. Pope's Essay, showing that it was founded on Leibnitz's system, and giving an account of the Fatalists, with a Confutation of their opinions, and an Illustration of the Doctrine of Free Will." The Professor proved, to his own satisfaction, that "the reasoning of the Essay on Man' led to fatalistic conclusions, destructive of the foundations of natural religion." The English translation of Crousaz's book, which appeared in 1738, was the work of Elizabeth Carter.1

1 The blue-stocking, noted for her translation of Epictetus, published in 1758. When she translated Crousaz's work she was only 22.

Pope had been prepared for the accusation that his teaching was tinged with Deism, but he was dismayed at what was nothing less than a charge of Atheism. Here was a new weapon in the hands of his enemies-a weapon, moreover, against which he was incapable of defending himself. His relief therefore was proportionately great when a new champion came to his aid. This was William Warburton, the protégé of Sutton, the friend of Theobald, and formerly, as we have seen, an adverse critic both of the Shakespeare edition and the "Essay on Man." Warburton had lately published the first volume of his "Divine Legation of Moses," a work which had made some sensation in ecclesiastical circles on account of its learning and its paradox. The reason for Warburton's sudden volte-face with regard to Pope has never been explained. He was not personally acquainted with the poet, and apparently had nothing to gain from his championship except a bold advertisement. However that might be, Warburton undertook to defend the orthodoxy of the "Essay on Man" against the criticisms of Crousaz, in a series of six Letters which appeared in a periodical review called The Works of the Learned. His "cock-sure" methods and the pedantic verbosity of his style helped in some measure to disguise the sophistries of his arguments, and though he could hardly have hoped to convince a trained theologian, Pope was more than satisfied with the

1 In 1738 he had published "The Universal Prayer"" to show that his system was founded in free-will and terminated in piety." The composition did not have the desired effect, being generally called the "Deist's Prayer."

line taken by counsel for the defence. February 2 he wrote to Warburton :

On

"I cannot forbear to return you my thanks for your animadversion on Mr. Crousaz : though I doubt not it was less a regard to me, than to candour and truth, which made you take the pains to answer so mistaken a man. I fear indeed he did not attack me on quite so good a principle: and whenever I see such a vein of uncharitableness and vanity in any work, whether it concerns me or another, I am always ready to thank God to find it accompanied with as much weakness.1 But this is what I should never have exposed myself, because it concerned myself and therefore I am the more obliged to you for doing it.

:

"I will not give you the unnecessary trouble of adding here to the defence you have made of me (though much might be said on the article of the passions in the second book). Only 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 Præ-established Harmony, till I found it in Mon. Crousaz's book.

"I am, sir, with a due esteem for your abilities. and for your candour (both of which I am no

1 It was characteristic of Pope to think that any man who criticised his work adversely must be moved by feelings of vanity and uncharitableness.

This was probably true, but Bolingbroke had studied Leibnitz, and Pope had studied Bolingbroke. Warburton had tried to prove that "the doctrine of Optimism advanced in the poem might have been derived from Plato, who maintained the freedom of the will, quite as well as from Leibnitz, who denied it." He attributed the obscurity or ambiguity of certain passages to the defectiveness of the translation.

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