These considerations are not affected by the question of the

distribution of happiness. Rewards and punishments might be meted out

with an even hand, and this life singly would still be quite incompetent

to fulfil the conditions of man's nature. But the pretext of Bolingbroke

is itself unfounded, and he yielded to the exigencies of his infidelity

when he maintained that the world had never furnished examples of

unequal happiness which could call for future redress. Pope's efforts to

prove the paradox are a continuous series of contradictions,

sophistries, and misstatements. "Virtue alone," he says, "is happiness

below," and "God intends happiness to be equal."[892] It follows, from

these premises, that Pope did not mean that all the world were equally

happy. Happiness he holds to be proportioned to virtue; the best men are

the richest in earthly felicity. The supposition is repugnant to

innumerable appearances, and Pope endeavoured to evade them by

contending that happiness is not placed in "externals."[893] "Virtue's

prize," he says, "is the soul's calm sunshine which nothing can

destroy;" and he justly calls men "weak and foolish" who imagine that a

better reward would be "a crown, a coach-and-six, a conqueror's sword,"

or the gown which is the badge of official dignity.[894] The fallacy is

upon the surface. "The soul's calm sunshine" may mean peace of

conscience or complete felicity. In the first sense it cannot be

"destroyed" by physical torture; in the second sense, physical torture

overclouds the "sunshine" and disturbs the "calm." It is vain to pretend

that a virtuous man upon the rack has the same amount of mental ease as

when he is in bodily comfort. "Externals" are one element in human

happiness, or the worst persecutions which have desolated the world

could not have occasioned the smallest exceptional sufferings to the

good. "If pain," says Mackintosh, "were not an evil, cruelty would not

be a vice."[895] Pope, in his luxurious retirement at Twickenham, might

exclaim, "Condition, circumstance, is not the thing."[896] He would have

thought differently if he had been the slave of a brutal master, or had

been immured in one of the dungeons called "little-ease," where a

prisoner of stout frame and sturdy principles was sometimes maimed in

the process of squeezing him into a space too small for his coffin.

Pope's reason for his opinion is weaker than the opinion itself.

"Present ill," he says, "is not a curse, nor present joy a good," since

joy and misery depend on our "future views of better or worse," and "the

balance of happiness" is kept even while the seemingly fortunate are

"placed in fear," and the unfortunate in "hope."[897] "Pope's sylphs,"

remarked Fox to Rogers, "are the prettiest invention in the world. He

failed most, I think, in sense; he seldom knew what he meant to

say."[898] Here we have an instance of the failing. His proposition is

that present happiness is independent of "externals," and his argument

asserts that it is not. If "fortune's gifts" invariably fill the

virtuous with "fear," and unfortunate circumstances buoy them up with

"hope," if happiness depends exclusively on "future views of better,"

and misery on apprehensions of "worse," it follows that virtue

imprisoned and persecuted is "in joy," and when free and prosperous is

distressed. "Externals" are not, as Pope pretends, indifferent; he has

merely transferred the preponderating weight to the opposite scale.

Adversity is a more exhilarating state than prosperity; the inmate of

"little-ease" was happier than his brethren of kindred virtue who were

at large. Rewards and punishments should be interchanged. Criminals

should be condemned to a life of luxury, and public benefactors should

be sent to jail. The feelings Pope ascribed to the human mind are

fictitious. Fear of reverses which do not appear to be impending, has

little influence in marring enjoyment, and hope alleviates torments

without depriving them of their sting.

The poet proceeds to unfold more particularly "what the happiness of

individuals is, as far as is consistent with the constitution of this

world."[899] All the good that God meant for mankind, "all the joys of

sense, all the pleasures of reason, lie in three words,--health, peace,

and competence."[900] The passage was versified from Bolingbroke, who

for "health" has "health of body," for "peace" has "tranquillity of

mind," and for "competence" has "competency of wealth."[901] Social

intercourse and liberty must be added to the list, or "all the joys of

sense," and all "the pleasures of reason" are compatible with solitary

confinement. Pope flings aside his previous doctrines. Four lines

earlier every individual who had the misfortune to possess "all the joys

of sense" was the slave of fear. Now these accompaniments are pronounced

essential to happiness. Lately happiness was independent of externals,

and now health of body and competency of wealth are declared to be

indispensable. Pope's change of front did not strengthen his position.

As health, peace, and competence are necessary to happiness they must be

constant attendants on worth, or his paradox that happiness is

proportioned to virtue falls to the ground. He accordingly affirmed, in

a suppressed couplet, that "the blessings were only denied to error,

pride, or vice," and the language in the text, to have any pertinency,

must bear the same construction. But will virtue secure health? Yes,

replies Pope, for "health consists with temperance alone," which, for

the purpose of his argument, must mean that all the temperate are

healthy. Safe from casualties, infection, and every other disorder, they

bear about with them a charmed life, and die at last in a good old age.

The poet passes over "competence," and in a subsequent part of his

epistle allows that "virtue sometimes starves."[902]

He had no sooner resolved happiness into "health, peace, and

competence," and claimed them for virtue, than he admits that vice may

be "blessed" and virtue "cursed," or afflicted. A fresh assumption is

introduced to restore the balance. "Contempt," he says, dogs "vice;"

"compassion" attends upon "virtue."[903] The new powers are not more

competent to the task assigned them than the hope and fear he had

invoked before. Men who are not truly virtuous, and yet not infamous for

vice, have frequently troops of friends, and meet with none of the

contempt which is to bring down their happiness to the standard of their

worth. Virtue, on the other hand, instead of rousing the compassion of

those who could protect it, has, in numberless instances, provoked

persecution, bonds, and death. Where the virtue is not the cause of the

misery the sufferers are often not in contact with the compassion, or

the sympathy is far from being an equivalent for the sorrow. Heaping

fallacy upon fallacy Pope falls back upon the plea that "virtue disdains

the advantages of prosperous vice."[904] Disdains the vicious means but

constantly longs for the prosperous end. The martyr to conscience when

shut up in "little-ease" was not indifferent to liberty. His compressed

body, his cramped limbs, the deprivation of light, fresh air, books, and

friends were horrible torture. There could be no stronger proof that

happiness was not proportioned to virtue than that his "disdain of

vice" should have compelled him to accept the alternative of a dungeon.

Hitherto Pope has argued that our virtue is the measure of our

happiness. He next descends to the subsidiary proposition that "no man

is unhappy through virtue," which means that the disasters of the

virtuous are never the consequences of their virtue; they are the "ills

and accidents that chance to all."[905] The proposition contains two

assertions,--the first that virtue never brings upon us "ills and

accidents," the second that it cannot protect us from them. Under the

first head Pope points to the heroes who perished fighting for their

country, and tells us that they did not meet their fate from "virtue,"

but from "contempt of life."[906] The martyrs to conscience may be

reckoned by hundreds of thousands, and Pope would have us understand

that none of them braved death in obedience to duty; they were simply

weary of existence. He would deprive humanity of its noblest triumphs

that virtue may be absolved from its manifest effects. He glides lightly

over the absurd pretence that virtue has never entailed suffering, and

dwells upon the second half of his proposition,--his admission that

virtuous and wicked are equally exposed to "ills and accidents." Good

and bad men, he says, are alike subjected to the laws of nature, and God

will not "reverse these laws for his favourites." A falling wall crushes

passengers without regard to virtue or vice;[907] blind forces take no

cognisance of morality. The doctrine is inadmissible; the laws of nature

cannot supersede the providence of God. Man's welfare and very existence

are at the mercy of many human and material agencies which man is unable

to anticipate or control. The Almighty preserves a glorious order in his

physical laws, and it is incredible that he should permit a chaos in the

highest department of our globe. He would not guard against

irregularities in the action of insensate matter, and allow good men to

be the sport of the endless hazards of life. The conclusions of reason

are confirmed by revelation. "Are not two sparrows," says our Lord,

"sold for a farthing, and one of them shall not fall on the ground

without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.

Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows."[908] He

who sees from the beginning the entire chain of causes and effects, can

devise laws which will provide for particular cases without any

subsequent interference. Or a man may be protected from a falling wall

by a sudden impulse to his mind whereby he may forget to go, or have a

motive to loiter, or to hasten forward, or to take another road.[909] Or

there may be a temporary interference with mechanical laws; or the

Almighty may use methods inconceivable by us. Not that his

superintendence implies that his servants are safe from any of the

ordinary operations of natural laws. Habitually to exempt the good would

be to abolish prudence in their dealings with physical forces, and to

engender presumption in the region of morals. The insecurity which keeps

virtue vigilant and faithful, the hardy discipline which draws out

ennobling energies, and corrects baser properties, would be turned to

carelessness and corruption. The interests of the virtuous will not

permit that they should be constant and conspicuous exceptions to the

common lot. But the "ills and accidents" never strike at random. The

human race is not with the Deity an abstract conception. He beholds

every creature in its individuality, and shields and chastens each by

the rules of a wisdom which can never be suspended. The idea we frame of

his attributes negatives the hypothesis of Pope. God cannot fail to

establish a harmony between physical laws, and the dispensation which

befits each particular man.

In admitting that calamities befall mankind without reference to virtue

and vice, Pope was drawn into statements which completely upset his

principle that happiness is always proportioned to desert. He asks if

virtue "made Digby, the son, expire, why his father lives full of days

and honour?"[910] He might be asked in turn, why, if good men in this

life have an equal share of happiness, the father should have lived

fifty years longer than the son? For happiness to be equal there must be

an equality of duration as well as of degree. He grants that "virtue

sometimes starves," and thinks it enough to answer, in the face of

historical facts, that virtue does not occasion the destitution.

"Bread," he says, "is the price of toil, not of virtue, and the good man

may be weak, be indolent."[911] Indolence is a vice, and irrelevant to

the discussion. The weakness may be a misfortune, and Lazarus is not

less deserving because he is covered with sores. Or the "good man" may

be neither "indolent" nor "weak," and yet be starved, which happened to

thousands of protestants who were driven from their homes and

employments by the callous bigotry of Louis XIV. Whatever the cause of

the starvation, the balance of happiness is disturbed, and Pope, to mask

the flaw in his argument, added that the "claim" of starving virtue was

not "to plenty, but content."[912] Now contentment is of two kinds.

There is a contentment of happiness which is incompatible with excessive

suffering, and a contentment of resignation which acquiesces in the

severest dispensations of Providence. St. Paul said in the latter sense,

"I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content,"[913]

which does not prevent his speaking repeatedly of the afflictions he

endured, or keep him from asserting that "no chastening for the present

seemeth to be joyous, but grievous."[914] Of this type is the

contentment of starving virtue,--a patient submission to trial, and not

the contentment which is required to produce equality of happiness.

Human nature has been denied the capacity for neutralising all degrees

of anguish. Pope straightway slides off into the subterfuge that the

craving for bread is "a demand for riches." He inveighs against the

rapacious desire, and insists that nothing will satisfy man.[915] He

undertook to prove that happiness is proportioned to virtue, and finding

his text too hard for him he substitutes an invective against insane

discontent.

A few undoubted truths are appended to the main argument of Pope. He

says that only a fool will think a man with health, and a clear

conscience, hated by God because he lacks a thousand a year.[916] He

tells us that genuine honour and shame are dependent on conduct, and not

on high or low station,[917] and that titles, power, fame, etc., are

insufficient to make bad men happy.[918] He comes to the instance of

"superior parts," and the inconsistency recommences. He supposes the

great intellect to be combined with learning, wisdom, and patriotic

virtue.[919] Out of compliment to his "guide, philosopher, and friend,"

Pope takes Bolingbroke for the typical example of this imposing union of

lofty qualities. In him we are to behold the universal fate of generous,

philanthropic wisdom. He "is condemned to drudge in business or in arts"

without any one to "second" him, or "judge" him rightly. He aspires "to

teach truths, and save a sinking land; few understand, all fear, and

none aid him." When he "drudged in arts" the world received coldly his

wordy rhetoric. When he "drudged in business" the country only saw in

him an intriguer for power. Novel ideas in politics, signal originality

in literature, often work their way slowly. Genius and patriotism have

faith in their conceptions, and are not daunted by opposition. The

public spirit which has to battle at all can seldom be placed under

softer conditions than Bolingbroke enjoyed. He had every luxury of a

civilised age; he had health and energy; he had unbroken leisure; he had

books at will; he had freedom to say and write what he pleased; he was

safe from every injury to person and property. Virtuous patriotism,

sitting at ease in a delightful library, and surrounded by blessings,

might be expected to exert itself with cheerful hope to enlighten a

tasteless and misguided nation. Quite the reverse. "Painful

pre-eminence!" exclaims Pope, and he declares that Bolingbroke by being

"above life's weakness" is above "its comforts too." The moral is that

wisdom is not to be desired; the pain exceeds the benefit. Happiness is

proportioned to virtue under the worst conditions of brutal persecution,

and yet wise and virtuous patriots, in the midst of the comforts of

life, are deprived of every comfort in life by the lamentable

circumstance that they are "above life's weakness."

There are many more contradictions in Pope's epistle, which is a tissue

of inconsistency and incoherence. He might have maintained a less

absolute doctrine with complete success. He might have shown that the

inequalities are less than they appear on a superficial view. He might

have pointed out that ultimate happiness can only arise from the conduct

which puts us at peace with ourselves and with God. He might have dwelt

on the satisfaction which lifts up the mind when conscience asserts its

majesty, and refuses to make the least concession to suffering. The

remaining disproportion between happiness and virtue is vindicated by

the moral blessing of affliction, which by fitting man for happiness

prepares the way for perfect harmony between happiness and virtue in a

blessed immortality. Trials, in the magnificent phrase of Shakespeare,

are "our outward consciences."[920] The pains of the last sickness which

precedes death are the consistent termination to the scheme. Good men

die as they have lived, in more or less suffering, that the work of life

may be completed,--that their better qualities may be developed and

strengthened, the remains of evil laid bare and extinguished. And though

all men are not submitted to the same tests either in their lives or

their deaths, the endless variety in their dispositions accounts for the

diversity in their circumstances. The Almighty Being who alone knows the

secrets of the heart adapts the "outward conscience" to the inward.

There is a weightier question than the distribution of happiness. Of the

innumerable discussions on the theory of morals by far the most

important is whether the end we propose to ourselves should be

self-interest or virtue. Pope adopted the selfish system without

reserve. The two principles, he says, which govern man, "self-love and

reason, aspire to one end, pleasure," and since their end is the same,

he accused the schoolmen of being "at war about a name" when they

refused to confound them.[921] He apparently had not a suspicion that

schoolmen, or any one else, had ever imagined that reason could reveal

another end to man than interest well understood. He reverts to his

selfish system in the epistle on Happiness, and proclaims in the first

line that "happiness is our being's end and aim." Virtue, the love of

God and man, are only means to promote our individual happiness, and

selfishness is, and ought to be, the supreme end of every creature. The

doctrine, as we have seen, when discussing Pope's second epistle,

contradicts the universal human conscience. The theoretical falsehood is

fruitful in disastrous results. The moral law, the law of good in

itself, is greater than the individual, and he bows down before its

inviolable sanctity, its absolute right to dominion. He is raised above

personal consequences. He knows that the universal law of good embraces

his good, and the reflection helps to sustain him in his trials, but his

main end is to fulfil a law which is superior to his individual

happiness, and which binds him by its intrinsic sacredness, and

independent authority. He dares not overrule it by his passing

inclinations, and endures all things rather than be guilty of a

sacrilegious encroachment on its integrity. The man, on the contrary,

whose one end is happiness, and who considers virtue to be simply the

means for compassing the end, has nothing outside himself which is of

the least importance to him, except in so far as it can be made

subservient to his personal felicity. Creator and creation are only

viewed as ministers to his unmitigated selfishness. Governed by this

single self-indulgent idea, and deriving no strength from the separate

supremacy of the moral law, he is ill prepared for a life of sacrifice.

He cannot forego in the present the happiness which he conceives to be

the sole end of his being, and he prefers immediate ease to interest

well-understood. The system of Pope was the doctrine of Epicurus. He,

too, taught that pleasure was "the end and aim" of man, and virtue the

only effectual means. His followers soon disregarded the means in their

impatience to reach the end, and epicureanism became synonymous with

grovelling sensuality. In vain we oppose the selfishness of a

long-sighted prudence to the selfishness of the hour. "Prudence," as

Kant says, only "counsels," and the steady ascendency over temptation is

reserved for the virtue which "commands." Common language proclaims the

intuitive principle of the mind. No man, not lost to shame, could

venture to say, "I must tell truth because it is prudent;" he says, "I

must be truthful because it is right."

Pope had not the remotest idea that he was an epicurean. He believed

that his system of ethics, with happiness for an end and virtue for the

means, was new to philosophy, and he did not hesitate to state that all

"the learned" who preceded him had been "blind."[922] He exemplified his

assertion by the instance of the epicureans and stoics. The stoics

reversed the terms of the epicurean formula; virtue alone was their end,

and happiness, the spontaneous, unsought consequence. The real

characteristics of these great rival schools were unknown to Pope. He

described them by false contrasts, and ignorantly charged them with the

folly of defining "happiness to be happiness." Greatest wonder of all,

he alleged against the epicurean doctrine, which was his own, that it

"sunk men to beasts."[923] He would naturally expound the systems he

understood the best, and hence we may estimate the extent of his

qualifications for dismissing every previous ethical theory with

compendious contempt. A sentence from Bolingbroke bears witness to the

scanty knowledge of Pope, and discloses the source of his scorn. "I

think," writes Bolingbroke, "you are not extremely conversant in the

works of Plato, and you may suspect therefore that I aggravate the

impertinence of his doctrines."[924] The impertinent doctrines were a

portion of the divine platonic ethics, and Pope, uninstructed in the

most famous systems of the ancients, did but reiterate the superficial

contempt of his master.

In place of the "mad opinions" of learned moralists, Pope enjoins us to

"take nature's path,"[925] little dreaming that he was repeating the

maxim of the sects he despised. "The perfection of man," says Diogenes

Laertius, quoting Zeno, the founder of the stoic school, "is to follow

nature, and that is to live virtuously, for nature leads us to that."

All the moralists accepted nature for their oracle; but the scholars

gave different versions of her responses. Pope in his second epistle

insisted that man was too weak to interpret them. A Newton, he said, who

could "climb from art to art" would inevitably be baffled in morals, for

whatever "reason wove, passion would undo."[926] In the fourth epistle

the difficulty has vanished; "all states can reach, all heads conceive"

happiness, and its parent morality; "there needs but thinking right, and

meaning well."[927] To think rightly and do rightly, which was before

impossible for even the lords of human kind, is declared to be within

easy reach of all the world. Nature spoke with two voices to Pope, and

what one voice affirmed the other denied.

Able writers have sometimes ridiculed the precept, "Follow nature,"

which means the laws of human nature, not perceiving that they were the

necessary foundation of morals. "The way to be happy," says the

philosopher in Rasselas, "is to live according to nature, in obedience

to that universal, and unalterable law, with which every heart is

originally impressed." "Sir," answers the prince, "I doubt not the truth

of a position which a man so learned has so confidently advanced. Let me

only know what it is to live according to nature." The philosopher

replies in unintelligible jargon, and Johnson adds, "The prince soon

found that this was one of the sages whom he should understand less as

he heard him longer."[928] The unreflecting disdain shows poorly by the

side of Butler's comment on the maxim. "The ancient moralists," he

said, "had some inward feeling or other, which they chose to express in

this manner, that man is born to virtue, that it consists in following

nature, and that vice is more contrary to this nature than tortures or

death. They had a perception that injustice was contrary to their

nature, and that pain was so also. They observed these two perceptions

totally different, not in degree, but in kind, and the reflecting upon

each of them, as they thus stood in their nature, wrought a full

intuitive conviction that more was due, and of right belonged to one of

these inward perceptions than to the other; that it demanded in all

cases to govern such a creature as man."[929] Apart from revelation we

can have no other knowledge of morality than nature affords. Honestly

interrogated nature does not put us off with unmeaning ambiguities. As

we learn through our appetites that we are intended to eat and drink, so

a higher faculty informs us that we are to govern our appetites, and the

whole of our being, by the supreme principles we call duty. Every time

we have a consciousness that our conduct is right or wrong, every time

we condemn or applaud the vice and virtue of our fellow men, every time

the law enforces justice and punishes injustice, we confess that duty is

in accordance with nature. The precept, "follow nature," is the rational

injunction to contemplate virtue in its inner source that we may see it

in its purity, and recognise its right to supremacy. If Pope had kept to

the precept, and remembered that for parents intentionally to train up

children in iniquity is the height of infamy, he would hardly have

imagined that "the Deity poured fierce ambition into Cæsar's mind." If

he had reflected that we condemn follies and vanities, he would not have

supposed that they were a provision of the Deity for our comfort. If he

had consulted conscience, and noticed that it instructs us to love good

in itself as well as our own good, to love God and our neighbour as an

end as well as a means, he would not have taught that the motive to

virtue was unmingled selfishness. If he had been at the trouble to

remark that duty takes in the whole circle of existence, and imposes

immutable laws, he would not have embraced the doctrine that moral

government was carried on by ruling passions which set up different

principles of action in different individuals, and in every instance

narrow life to an exclusive, and usually vicious propensity. The

observation of nature would have saved Pope from these, and many other

errors, which were the consequence of his piecing together bits of

theories from books without submitting them to the test he recommended

to his readers.

The deepest ethical thinkers have seldom, in all things, been faithful

interpreters of nature. Their errors, often momentous, had a different

origin from those of Pope. Few persons trace back moral impressions to

the principles from which they flow. They act on the intuitive

conceptions which precede philosophy, and which, not being pared and

twisted to fit a theory, are as comprehensive as nature. The philosopher

classifies the implanted propensities and convictions, describes them

with precision, and brings them into stronger relief. But what he gains

in distinctness he is apt to lose in breadth; he curtails while he

elucidates. His ambition is to discover simplicity in complexity, unity

in variety, and he dismembers nature that he may reduce the phenomena

within the limits of a general law. Zeno and Epicurus are examples of

the tendency. They agreed that man had properly only a single end to

which his whole being should be directed. The epicureans said that this

end, or chief good, was pleasure, which depends on personal feeling; the

stoic said it was virtue, the submission to the universal rule of right,

which is above personal preferences. An ordinary mortal who does not

philosophise, and has no care to force nature into the mould of an

hypothesis, never questions that he is constituted for the double end of

happiness and virtue. The two often clash, and he is not perplexed by

the impossibility of satisfying both. When one must yield he knows that

virtue is paramount, and he usually believes that the present sacrifice

of happiness to virtue will be succeeded by a kingdom in which they will

be finally reconciled. The partial doctrine set up by the stoic kept

virtue on her high, heroic throne; the doctrine of the epicurean

degraded her into the slave of pleasure: the first school ennobled, the

second debased human nature, but both mutilated it. Each system came

into contact with facts which compelled its adherents to be inconsistent

or absurd, and enlightened disciples preferred inconsistency to

absurdity. This passion for general laws at the expense of truth is

conspicuous throughout the whole history of philosophy. The profoundest

investigators have been prone to select single aspects of many-sided

nature, and make the part the law for the whole. The false

generalisation impels the theorist to suppress and distort refractory

phenomena, or he endeavours to hide under transparent evasions his

deviations from his hypothesis, or he lapses into contradictions from

which he turns away his eyes, not wishing to perceive them. The spurious

unity, which is the infirmity of philosophers, was not the vice of Pope.

He adopted, on the contrary, a chaos of principles which were mutually

destructive. He accepted contributions from any school, because he

understood none. He was so unversed in philosophy that in the account

which he drew up of his "Design," he asserted that the science of human

nature was reduced to "a few clear points," and that the "disputes" were

all on the details. His "design" was to keep to the "few clear points"

which alone, in his opinion, were of much importance to mankind. They

were principally the origin of evil, the theory of morals, the origin of

government and society. The "clear points" had produced whole libraries

of controversy, the "disputes" had descended in full vigour to Pope's

day, and they have continued undiminished on to ours. His own solutions

of the problems were contradictory, and he was hopelessly at war with

himself on the very topics for which he claimed universal peace. He did

not depart in his "Design" from his habit of self-contradiction, and the

moment he had stated that there were no disputes on the general

principles, he took credit for "steering betwixt the extremes of

doctrines seemingly opposite." He at the same time arrogated for his

"system of ethics" the special "merit" that it was "not inconsistent."

He had just enough knowledge to seduce him into an unconscious exposure

of his ignorance. His delusions are intelligible when we learn the

nature of his philosophical training. "I write to you, and for you,"

says Bolingbroke, "and you would think yourself little obliged to me if

I took the pains of explaining in prose what you would not think it

necessary to explain in verse, and in the character of a poetical

philosopher who may dwell in generalities."[930] Bolingbroke wrote to

instruct Pope, and Pope only cared to learn the "generalities" he was to

put into verse. He never acquired the elements of philosophy; he had

merely been furnished with materials for a philosophical poem. The few

ideas he gleaned at random from other sources served no better end than

to increase the confusion. He said "he chose verse" because it was more

concise and impressive than prose.[931] The alleged choice was

necessity. His meagre knowledge would have been ludicrous in a formal

treatise. The ceremonious robe of verse was essential to conceal the

deformed and diminutive body.

De Quincey thought that the "formal exposure of Pope's

hollow-heartedness" would be most profitably accomplished by laying open

thoroughly the ethical argument of the Essay on Man. He declined the

task as too long and polemical for an article in a journal, but he

stated his views in general terms. He said that the poem "sinned chiefly

by want of central principle, and by want therefore of all coherency

amongst the separate thoughts." He objects that the sense will vary with

the nature of the connecting links we supply, and he ascribes the

opposite interpretations of Crousaz and Warburton to the ambiguity which

leaves readers the choice of "a loyal or treasonable meaning."[932] He

imputes the fault to the impossibility of completing the argument

without spoiling the poetry, and to the superficial nature of Pope's

studies, "if study we can call a style of reading so desultory as his."

This vagrant habit of mind he attributes to "luxurious indolence." "The

poet," he says, "fastidiously retreated from all that threatened labour.

He fluttered among the flower-beds of literature or philosophy far more

in the character of a libertine butterfly for casual enjoyment, than of

a hard-working bee pursuing a premeditated purpose."[933] Indolence

cannot justly be charged upon Pope. He plodded at his art with the

steadiness of a man who follows a regular calling.[934] His ignorance of

philosophy, his want of due preparation for his Essay, arose from

defects of understanding, and not from a moral infirmity of will. He was

self-educated, and had never penetrated in his youth by regular and

sustained approaches to the heart of any difficult science. He skimmed

literature to pick up sentiments which could be versified, and to learn

attractive forms of composition. His mind took the set of his early

habits, and he appears in manhood to have had no conception of

philosophical thought, no glimmer of the combination of philosophical

details into an integral design. His works abound in isolated ideas

which are marked by sound sense, and side by side with them are many

idle or extravagant notions, and glaring contradictions. The pieces were

not struck off at a heat. They were built up slowly, composed patiently,

and corrected repeatedly. He never spared pains, and the want of

reflection his works discover was the fault of an intellect unconscious

of its weaknesses. To him the disjointed bits of philosophy presented no

gaps. He says in his "Design" that the system "was short yet not

imperfect." He believed that the conciseness added to "the force as well

as grace of his arguments," and that he had nowhere "sacrificed

perspicuity to ornament, wandered from precision, or broken the chain of

the reasoning." His love of fame would have prevented his sending forth

knowingly a weak and fragmentary poem. His moral apathy did not

therefore consist in the self-indulgent negligence which refuses to put

itself to a strain. The moral offence was in another direction,--in the

ambiguities which were intended to pass off the Essay for anti-christian

with infidels, and for christian with believers, and which resulted in

Pope's adoption of the first interpretation under Bolingbroke, and of

the second under Warburton. The dereliction of principle was worse than

De Quincey supposed. He has equally underrated the blots in the

philosophy when he imagined that Pope erred only by omissions. The

"chasms" in his ethics are trifling compared to the radical vice of his

doctrines, and the repeated conflict of jarring systems. The "audacious

dogmatism and insolent quibbles"[935] of Warburton would not have been

needed in expanding an abbreviated argument. He had to distort the

obvious meaning of Pope in order to produce a semblance of consistency,

and he has still oftener left the language of the text without comment

because it was beyond the power of shameless misinterpretation to effect

an ostensible harmony.

The judgments on the Essay on Man have been very various. "It appears to

me," says Voltaire, "the most beautiful, the most useful, the most

sublime didactic poem that has ever been written in any language." He

said on another occasion that Pope "carried the torch into the abyss of

being, and that the art of poetry, sometimes frivolous, and sometimes

divine, was in him useful to the human race."[936] Voltaire had a

twofold reason for his admiration. As a hater of christianity he hailed

in the Essay the championship of natural religion against revealed, and

as an author he delighted in the rhymed philosophy which was the staple

of his own prosaic verse. Marmontel joined in the praise of the poet,

but formed a juster estimate of the moralist. "Pope has shown," he said,

"how high poetry could soar on the wings of philosophy. But he had

adopted a system which presented terrible difficulties, and in reply to

the complaints of man on the misery of his condition he usually offers

images for proofs, and abuse for reasons."[937] The censure is just.

Pope loves to silence objections by vilifying mankind, and calling his

adversaries impious, proud, and fools. Dugald Stewart agreed with

Voltaire. "The Essay on Man," he says, "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."[938] The "few faulty passages" were subsequently

specified by Stewart, and such is the power of sound to withdraw the

mind from the sense that this able metaphysician overlooked the

fundamental errors of the poem, albeit they contradicted his own ethical

views. Hazlitt differs as much from Stewart as Marmontel did from

Voltaire. "The Essay on Man," he tells us, "is not Pope's best work. All

that he says, 'the very words and to the self-same tune,' would prove

just as well that whatever is is wrong, as that whatever is is

right."[939] The remark is but a slight exaggeration of the truth. The

logic of assertion, and often of vituperative assertion, in which Pope

abounded, is available for every system, and his admission that God is

the instigator of evil was a fit foundation for a pessimist philosophy.

De Quincey's opinion is the most unfavourable of all. "If the question,"

he says, "were asked, What ought to have been the best among Pope's

poems? most people would answer, the Essay on Man. If the question were

asked, What is the worst? all people of judgment would say, the Essay on

Man. Whilst yet in its rudiments this poem claimed the first place by

the promise of its subject; when finished, by the utter failure of its

execution, it fell into the last."[940] "Execution" is used by De

Quincey in its widest sense, and includes the philosophy of the Essay.

This we have endeavoured to estimate, and have now to speak of the

poetry.

"In my mind," says Lord Byron, writing of Pope, "the highest of all

poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be

moral truth," and he adds that "ethical or didactic poetry requires more

mind, more wisdom, more power" than all the "descriptions" of natural

scenery that were ever penned, "and all the epics that ever were founded

upon fields of battle."[941] To the assertion that ethical poets

transcended all other poets in genius, Hazlitt answered, that the "mind,

wisdom, and power" is displayed in the "philosophic invention," and as

this "rests with the first author of a moral truth," or moral theory, a

copyist is not great because he gives a metrical form to an ethical

common-place. "The decalogue," he says, "as a practical prose

composition, or as a body of moral laws and precepts, is of sufficient

weight and authority, but we should not regard the putting of this into

heroic verse as an effort of the highest poetry."[942] To the assertion

that ethical poetry must take precedence of all other poetry, "because

moral truth and moral conduct are of such vast and paramount concernment

in human life," Hazlitt answered, that "it did not follow that they were

the better for being put into rhyme." "This reasoning," he continues,

"reminds us of the critic who said that the only poetry he knew of, good

for anything, was the four lines beginning 'Thirty days hath September,'

for that these were really of some use in finding out the number of days

in the different months of the year. The rules of arithmetic are

important in many respects, but we do not know that they are the fittest

subjects of poetry."[943] The reply of Hazlitt is conclusive. Lord Byron

had confounded the importance of facts with their fitness for poetry,

the repetition of a truth with the genius which discovers it. He was "in

a great passion," says De Quincey, "and wrote up Pope by way of writing

down others," the others being Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge.[944]

He had taken a false measure of his men. They were too strong in their

own poetical convictions to be mortified by the absurdities of an

intemperate rival.

The error of Byron was akin to the misconception of the office of

didactic poems, which De Quincey exposed in his criticism on Pope's

Essay on Man. "As a term of convenience," he says, "didactic may serve

to discriminate one class of poetry, but didactic it cannot be in

philosophic rigour without ceasing to be poetry." If the object of

Armstrong had been to teach Medicine, of Dyer to produce a manual for

shepherds and cloth manufacturers, of Philips to write a treatise for

gardeners and makers of cider, he maintains that it would have been

idiotcy to begin by putting on the fetters of metre. He remarks that a

worse restriction is the necessity of omitting a vast variety of

details, and capital sections of the subject, and that in the constant

need to forego either poetry or instruction the poet never hesitates to

abandon the instruction. The true object, he conceives, of a didactic

poem is to bring out the "circumstances of beautiful form, feeling,

incident, or any other interest" which lurk in didactic topics. The

sentiment which the tutor neglects the poet evolves, and he introduces

utilitarian knowledge for the sole purpose of eliciting an element

distinct from its bare, prosaic utility.[945] This is the rational

theory. In Pope's generation, and for some years afterwards, a different

idea was widely prevalent. "The end of the didactic poem," says

Marmontel, "is to instruct. It were to be wished that the principles of

the most important arts should all be reduced to verse. It is thus that

at the birth of letters all useful truths were consigned to memory. To

bring back the didactic poem to its primitive utility ought to be the

object of emulation to the poets of an age of light."[946] The system

which Marmontel recommended for an age of light was only fitted for an

age of darkness. The utility of a didactic work depends on its lucidity,

its precision, and its fullness. The use is defeated if the instruction

is fragmentary, incoherent, circuitous, and cumbrous. When men emerge

from ignorance, and when knowledge begins to grow systematic and exact,

the employment of verse for expounding arts, sciences, philosophy, and

history becomes puerile and impotent. The moment they are brought under

the dominion of the enlightened understanding the freedom of prose is

essential to unfold them with clearness, completeness, and accuracy. The

suggestion of Marmontel for restoring didactic poetry to its primitive

use was the way to reduce it to imbecility. The events of English

history are of greater moment than the cutting off Miss Fermor's curl,

and an English history in verse would be "higher poetry" according to

Byron, more "useful poetry" according to Marmontel, than the Rape of the

Lock. In reality it would not be high or useful, poetry or history, but

simply a folly. The didactic poets who had a truer comprehension of the

nature of poetry, and who endeavoured to render the rules of an art or

science subservient to poetic effect, have seldom succeeded. The

inherent, prosaic element preponderated, and the Arts of Poetry,

Criticism, Translating Verse, etc. are for the most part dreary

compositions which afford as little delight as instruction.

Bolingbroke had right conceptions of the characteristics of didactic

poetry, and he imparted his views to Pope. "Should the poet," he says,

"make syllogisms in verse, or pursue a long process of reasoning in the

didactic style, he would be sure to tire his reader on the whole, like

Lucretius, though he reasoned better than the Roman, and put into some

parts of his work the same poetical fire. He must contract, he may

shadow, he has a right to omit whatever will not be cast in the poetic

mould, and when he cannot instruct he may hope to please. In short, it

seems to me, that the business of the philosopher is to dilate, to

press, to prove, to convince, and that of the poet to hint, to touch his

subject with short and spirited strokes, to warm the affections, and to

speak to the heart."[947] Bolingbroke's theory of poetry was superior to

his practical taste. He said that all Pope's writings were pre-eminent

for "the happy association of great coolness of judgment with great heat

of imagination." "Pope's Essay on Criticism," he says again, "was the

work of his childhood almost; but is such a monument of good sense and

poetry as no other, that I know, has raised in his riper years."[948]

The man who could discover transcendent poetry in the Essay on

Criticism, and great heat of imagination in all Pope's writings, could

have had but a faint, diluted perception of the imaginative and poetic.

His belief that the ethical philosophy of the Essay on Man could be

brought under his law of didactic poetry was a fresh instance of his

want of insight into the demands both of poetry and philosophy. A system

of philosophy cannot be conveyed in elegant extracts. "Every part," says

de Quincey, "depends upon every other part: in such a nexus of truths,

to insulate is to annihilate. Severed from each other the parts lose

their support, their coherence, their very meaning; you have no liberty

to reject or choose." It was not enough for Pope to detail his system.

He had to vindicate, and establish it. "In his theme," continues De

Quincey, "everything is polemic; you move only through dispute, you

prosper only by argument and never-ending controversy. There is not

positively one capital proposition or doctrine about man, about his

origin, his nature, his relations to God, or his prospects, but must be

fought for with energy, watched at every turn with vigilance, and

followed into endless mazes, not under the choice of the writer, but

under the inexorable dictation of the argument. Here lay the

impracticable dilemma for Pope's Essay on Man. To satisfy the demands of

the subject was to defeat the objects of poetry. To evade the demands in

the way that Pope has done, is to offer us a ruin for a palace."[949]

The poetry could not escape without injury. The philosophic pretensions

Pope advanced at the outset compelled him to embark in prosaic

arguments; the philosophy and the poetry were mutually destructive. Left

to himself he would have kept to his "ethics in the Horatian way," to

the sketches of character, and reflections upon human conduct, which

constitute his Moral Essays. His "guide" dictated to him a more

ambitious philosophy,--not the "divine philosophy which is musical as

Apollo's lute,"[950] which touches tender feelings, and appeals to the

intuitive moral emotions, but a hybrid philosophy too scholastic to move

the heart, and too meagre and perplexed to satisfy the understanding.

The false scheme of embodying scientific philosophy in verse determined

in advance the failure of the Essay on its poetic side. There might be

passages of good poetry, but not a good poem. "The episodes in the Essay

on Man," says Hazlitt, "the description of the poor Indian, and the lamb

doomed to death, are all the unsophisticated reader ever remembers of

that much talked of production."[951] The remark which Hazlitt employed

to condemn the Essay, was used by Bowles in its favour. The ethics, in

his eyes, were only the groundwork for poetical embroidery. "We hardly,"

he said, "think of the philosophy, whether it is good or bad," and he

represented the reader hurried away by the finished and touching

pictures of the Indian and the lamb, which are exceptions to the

didactic tenor of the poem, and speak to the sympathies of mankind.

Hazlitt's application of the criticism was correct, and the eulogy, or

apology, put forward by Bowles, was really censure. The happy episodes

are but a fragment of the four epistles. The rest is designed for

philosophical reasoning, and if we hardly think of the philosophy, there

is little left except sound. The philosophy is not dimmed by the blaze

of poetry. There is no splendour of imagery, no brilliancy of idea to

overshadow the argument, and the sole reason the philosophy fails to

take hold of the mind is because it is vague and disconnected, because

the whole, as De Quincey says, "is the realisation of anarchy."[952] The

want of philosophic unity might have been largely compensated by the

personal unity of strong conviction; the earnest faith and feelings of

the man might have stood in the place of the scientific completeness of

the subject. In nothing was Pope more deficient. For personal

convictions he substituted any discordant notion which he fancied would

look well in verse, and the Essay is no more bound together by the

pervading spirit of individual sentiment than by logical connection. The

languid inattention which the poem invites is seen in the statement of

Bowles that there is "a nice precision in every word." No one could

attempt to get at Pope's meaning without being frequently tormented by

the difficulty, and sometimes the impossibility, of interpreting his

lax, indeterminate language. "Hardly thinking of the philosophy," Bowles

did not observe that there was often a lamentable want of precision in

Pope's conceptions, and when these are misty and confused, the

expression of them cannot be rigorous and definite. Loose and ambiguous

phraseology was not the only fault of style. The use of inversions, and

of unlicensed, elliptical modes of speech, was a cardinal blemish in

Pope's poetry. The failing reached its height in the Essay on Man. Many

of the contortions are barbarous, and were enough of themselves to

dispel the delusion that Pope was distinguished by correctness of

composition. His grammatical faults, when not deliberate to force a

rhyme, are comparatively venial. Such oversights are found in all

authors, and proceed from inadvertence; they are little more than

clerical errors. The deformities of vicious construction are of a

different order. They arose from defect of literary power, from the

incapacity to reconcile the requirements of verse with the rules of

English. The maimed and distorted language obscures the sense, destroys

or debases the poetry, and lessens the general impression of his genius.

The Essay was altogether a mistake. A slip from a neighbour's tree was

planted in an uncongenial soil, and the cultivation bestowed upon it

produced little more than feeble rootlets, and sickly shoots.

M. Taine asserts that from the Restoration to the French Revolution,

from Waller to Johnson, from Hobbes and Temple to Robertson and Hume,

all our literature, both prose and verse, bears the impress of classic

art. The mode, he says, culminated in the reign of Queen Anne, and Pope,

he considers, was the extreme example of it. The characteristics which

M. Taine ascribes to the classic era are, in the matter, common-place

truths, and, in the manner, a style finished and artificial,--noble

language, oratorical pomp, and studied correctness. Poetry ceased to be

inventive; the very composition is uniform, and the obvious or borrowed

thoughts are all cast in one mould. Verse is nothing more than cold,

rational prose, a species of superior conversation measured off into

lengths, and fringed with rhyme; the form predominates over the matter;

the ostentatious exterior is the mask to impoverished, colourless

ideas.[953] The habit of M. Taine is to generalise a partial truth into

extravagance. Many of the most eminent authors who flourished between

the English Restoration and the French Revolution wrote in a style far

removed from that which M. Taine calls classical,--in an inelegant,

uncondensed style as Locke, in a crude, clumsy style as Bishop Butler,

in a vigorous, colloquial style as Bentley, in a homely, straightforward

style as Swift, in an unpretentious, narrative style as De Foe, in a

loose, familiar style as Burnet. The verse differs like the prose,

though in a less degree, and is not "of a uniform make as if fabricated

by a machine."[954] The witty and grotesque Hudibras of Butler, the

tales, and many short poems of Prior, the humourous, satiric verses of

Swift, the Songs and Fables of Gay, the Seasons of Thomson, the heroics

of Pope, are all in dissimilar styles. Neither is the substance of the

prose and verse, from the Restoration to the French Revolution, an

invariable common-sense mediocrity. There is a great display of genius

in political philosophy and political economy, in moral, metaphysical,

and natural science, in manifold species of satire and fiction, and,

omitting Milton, who was formed under earlier influences, in various

kinds of poetry, short of the highest. M. Taine was partly conscious of

the facts, as may be seen in his individual criticisms, which are a

refutation of his general theory. There is this much truth in his view,

that there was a growing tendency to cultivate style, and in some

writers the art degenerated into the artificial. Among the numerous

varieties of the defect one is a monotonous structure of verse and

sentence, another the attempt to disguise the commonness of the thoughts

by the elaboration of the workmanship. These are frequent faults in the

poetry of Pope, and the mannerism remains when the execution is a

failure. His style is admirable in parts, but he falls far below Dryden

in the general elasticity of his composition, in the wealth of his

language, and in the subtle intricacies of metrical harmony. His

thoughts are often gems rendered lustrous by the skill of the cutter,

but intermingling with them are counterfeit stones which impose by their

glitter on the superficial observer, and when examined are found

worthless.

* * * * *

TO THE READER.[955]

As the epistolary way of writing hath prevailed much of late, we have

ventured to publish this piece composed some time since, and whose[956]

author chose this manner, notwithstanding his subject was high and of

dignity, because of its being mixed with argument, which of its nature

approacheth to prose. This, which we first give the reader, treats of

the nature and state of man with respect to the universal system. The

rest will treat of him with respect to his own system, as an individual,

and as a member of society, under one or other of which heads all ethics

are included.

As he imitates no man, so he would be thought to vie with no man in

these epistles, particularly with the noted author of two lately

published;[957] but this he may most surely say, that the matter of them

is such as is of importance to all in general, and of offence to none in

particular.[958]

THE DESIGN.[959]

Having proposed to write some pieces on human life and manners, such as,

to use my Lord Bacon's expression, come home to men's business and

bosoms, I thought it more satisfactory to begin with considering man in

the abstract, his nature and his state; since to prove any moral duty,

to enforce any moral precept, or to examine the perfection or

imperfection of any creature whatsoever, it is necessary first to know

what condition and relation it is placed in, and what is the proper end

and purpose of its being.

The science of human nature is, like all other sciences, reduced to a

few clear points. There are not many certain truths in this world. It is

therefore in the anatomy of the mind as in that of the body, more good

will accrue to mankind by attending to the large, open, and perceptible

parts, than by studying too much such finer nerves and vessels, the

conformations and uses of which will for ever escape our observation.

The disputes are all upon these last, and, I will venture to say, they

have less sharpened the wits than the hearts of men against each other,

and have diminished the practice, more than advanced the theory of

morality. If I could flatter myself that this Essay has any merit, it is

in steering betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite, in

passing over terms utterly unintelligible, and in forming[960] a

temperate, yet not inconsistent, and a short, yet not imperfect, system

of ethics.

This I might have done in prose; but I chose verse, and even rhyme, for

two reasons. The one will appear obvious; that principles, maxims, or

precepts so written, both strike the reader more strongly at first, and

are more easily retained by him afterwards. The other may seem odd, but

is true. I found I could express them more shortly this way than in

prose itself; and nothing is more certain, than that much of the force

as well as grace of arguments or instructions depends on their

conciseness. I was unable to treat this part of my subject more in

detail, without becoming dry and tedious; or more poetically, without

sacrificing perspicuity to ornament, without wandering from the

precision, or breaking the chain of reasoning. If any man can unite all

these, without diminution of any of them, I freely confess he will

compass a thing above my capacity.

What is now published, is only to be considered as a general map of man,

marking out no more than the greater parts, their extent, their limits,

and their connexion, but leaving the particular to be more fully

delineated in the charts which are to follow. Consequently, these

Epistles, in their progress (if I have health and leisure to make any

progress) will be less dry, and more susceptible of poetical ornament. I

am here only opening the fountains, and clearing the passage. To deduce

the rivers, to follow them in their course, and to observe their

effects, may be a task more agreeable.

ARGUMENT OF EPISTLE I.

OF THE NATURE AND STATE OF MAN WITH RESPECT TO THE UNIVERSE.

Of man in the abstract--I. That we can judge only with regard to our own

system, being ignorant of the relation of systems and things, ver. 17,

&c. II. That man is not to be deemed imperfect, but a being suited to

his place and rank in the creation, agreeable to the general order of

things, and conformable to ends and relations to him unknown, ver. 35,

&c. III. That it is partly upon his ignorance of future events, and

partly upon the hope of a future state, that all his happiness in the

present depends, ver. 77, &c. IV. The pride of aiming at more knowledge,

and pretending to more perfection, the cause of man's error and misery.

The impiety of putting himself in the place of God, and judging of the

fitness or unfitness, perfection or imperfection, justice or injustice,

of His dispensations, ver. 113, &c. V. The absurdity of conceiting

himself the final cause of the creation, or expecting that perfection in

the moral world, which is not in the natural, ver. 131, &c. VI. The

unreasonableness of his complaints against Providence, while on the one

hand he demands the perfections of the angels, and on the other the

bodily qualifications of the brutes, though, to possess any of the

sensitive faculties in a higher degree, would render him miserable, ver.

173, &c. VII. That throughout the whole visible world, an universal

order and gradation in the sensual and mental faculties is observed,

which causes a subordination of creature to creature, and of all

creatures to man. The gradations of sense, instinct, thought,

reflection, reason; that reason alone countervails all the other

faculties, ver. 207. VIII. How much further this order and subordination

of living creatures may extend, above and below us; were any part of

which broken, not that part only, but the whole connected creation, must

be destroyed, ver. 233. IX. The extravagance, madness, and pride of such

a desire, ver. 259. X. The consequence of all, the absolute submission

due to Providence, both as to our present and future state, ver. 281,

&c., to the end.

AN ESSAY ON MAN.

IN FOUR EPISTLES.

EPISTLE I.

Awake, my St. John![961] leave all meaner things

To low ambition, and the pride of kings.[962]

Let us, since life can[963] little more supply

Than just to look about us and to die,[964]

Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man;[965] 5

A mighty maze![966] but not without a plan;[967]

A wild, where weeds and flow'rs promiscuous shoot;[968]

Or garden tempting with forbidden fruit.[969]

Together let us beat this ample field,

Try what the open, what the covert yield;[970] 10

The latent tracts, the giddy heights, explore,[971]

Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar;[972]

Eye nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies,[973]

And catch the manners living as they rise;[974]

Laugh where we must, be candid[975] where we can; 15

But vindicate the ways of God to man.[976]

[Sidenote: Man can reason only from things known, and judge only with

regard to his own system.]

I. Say first, of God above or man below,

What can we reason but from what we know?

Of man, what see we but his station here,

From which to reason, or to which refer?[977] 20

Through worlds unnumbered though the God be known,[978]

'Tis ours to trace him only in our own.

He, who through vast immensity can pierce,

See worlds on worlds compose one universe,[979]

Observe how system into system runs, 25

What other planets circle[980] other suns,

What varied being peoples ev'ry star,[981]

May tell why heav'n has made us as we are.[982]

But of this frame, the bearings and the ties,

The strong connections, nice dependencies, 30

Gradations[983] just, has thy pervading soul

Looked through,[984] or can a part contain the whole?[985]

Is the great chain that draws all to agree,[986]

And drawn supports,[987] upheld by God or thee?

[Sidenote: Man is not therefore a judge of his own perfection or

imperfection, but is certainly such a being as is suited to his place

and rank in creation.]

II. Presumptuous man! the reason wouldst thou find, 35

Why formed so weak, so little, and so blind?

First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess,

Why formed no weaker, blinder, and no less?[988]

Ask of thy mother earth, why oaks are made

Taller or stronger than the weeds they shade! 40

Or ask of yonder argent fields[989] above

Why Jove's satellites[990] are less than Jove![991]

Of systems possible, if 'tis confessed

That wisdom infinite[992] must form the best,[993]

Where all must full or not coherent be,[994] 45

And all that rises rise in due degree,

Then, in the scale of reas'ning life, 'tis plain,

There must be, somewhere, such a rank as man:[995]

And all the question (wrangle e'er so long)

Is only this, if God has placed him wrong.[996] 50

Respecting man, whatever wrong we call,

May, must be right, as relative to all.[997]

In human works, though laboured on with pain,

A thousand movements scarce one purpose gain;

In God's, one single can its end produce; 55

Yet serves to second too some other use.[998]

So man, who here seems principal alone,

Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown,

Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal;[999]

'Tis but a part we see,[1000] and not a whole.[1001] 60

When the proud steed shall know why man restrains

His fiery course, or[1002] drives him o'er the plains;

When the dull ox, why now he breaks the clod,

Is now a victim, and now Egypt's god;[1003]

Then shall man's pride and dulness comprehend 65

His actions', passions', being's, use and end;

Why doing, suff'ring, checked, impelled; and why

This hour a slave, the next a deity.[1004]

Then say not man's imperfect, heav'n in fault;

Say rather man's as perfect as he ought:[1005] 70

His knowledge measured to his state and place,[1006]

His time a moment, and a point his space.[1007]

If to be perfect in a certain sphere,

What matter, soon or late, or here or there?[1008]

The bless'd to-day is as completely so, 75

As who began a thousand years ago.[1009]

[Sidenote: His happiness depends on his ignorance to a certain degree.]

III. Heav'n from all creatures hides the book of fate,

All but the page prescribed, their present state;

From brutes what men, from men what spirits know;

Or who could suffer being here below?[1010] 80

The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,

Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?

Pleased to the last he crops the flow'ry food,

And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.[1011]

O blindness to the future! kindly giv'n, 85

That each may fill the circle marked by heav'n:

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,

A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,[1012]

Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,[1013]

And now a bubble burst, and now a world. 90

[Sidenote: And on his hope of a relation to a future state.]

Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;

Wait the great teacher death, and God adore.

What future bliss he gives not thee to know,

But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.[1014]

Hope springs eternal in the human breast; 95

Man never is, but always to be blessed.[1015]

The soul, uneasy, and confined from[1016] home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind

Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;[1017] 100

His soul proud science never taught to stray

Far as the solar walk[1018] or milky way;[1019]

Yet simple nature to his hope has giv'n,

Behind the cloud-topped hill,[1020] an humbler heav'n;

Some safer world in depth of woods embraced, 105

Some happier island in the wat'ry waste,[1021]

Where slaves once more their native land behold,

No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.[1022]

To be, contents his natural desire;

He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire; 110

But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,

His faithful dog shall bear him company.[1023]

[Sidenote: The pride of aiming at more knowledge and perfection, and the

impiety of pretending to judge of the dispensations of Providence, the

causes of man's error and misery.]

IV. Go, wiser thou! and in thy scale of sense,[1024]

Weigh thy opinion against Providence;[1025]

Call imperfection what thou fanci'st such, 115

Say, Here he gives too little, there too much![1026]

Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust,[1027]

Yet cry, If man's unhappy, God's unjust;[1028]

If man alone ingross not heav'n's high care,

Alone made perfect here, immortal there:[1029] 120

Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod,[1030]

Re-judge his justice, be the god of God.[1031]

In pride, in reas'ning pride,[1032] our error lies;

All quit their sphere and rush into the skies!

Pride still is aiming at the bless'd abodes, 125

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.[1033]

Aspiring to be gods if angels fell,

Aspiring to be angels men rebel:[1034]

And who but wishes to invert the laws

Of order, sins against th' Eternal Cause. 130

[Sidenote: The absurdity of conceiting himself the final cause of

creation, or expecting that perfection in the moral world which is not

in the natural.]

V. Ask for what end the heav'nly bodies shine,

Earth for whose use, Pride answers,[1035] "'Tis for mine!

For me kind nature wakes her genial pow'r,

Suckles each herb, and spreads out every flow'r;[1036]

Annual for me, the grape, the rose renew 135

The juice nectareous, and the balmy dew;

For me the mine a thousand treasures brings;

For me health gushes from a thousand springs;

Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise;

My footstool earth, my canopy the skies!"[1037] 140

But errs not nature from this gracious end,

From burning suns when livid deaths descend,

When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweep[1038]

Towns to one grave, whole nations[1039] to the deep?[1040]

"No," 'tis replied, "the first Almighty Cause 145

Acts not by partial but by gen'ral laws:[1041]

Th' exceptions few; some change since all began;[1042]

And what created perfect?"--Why then man?

If the great end be human happiness,

Then nature deviates;[1043] and can man do less?[1044] 150

As much that end a constant course requires

Of show'rs and sunshine, as of man's desires:

As much eternal springs and cloudless skies,

As men for ever temp'rate, calm, and wise.[1045]

If plagues or earthquakes break not heaven's design, 155

Why then a Borgia or a Catiline?[1046]

Who knows but He, whose hand the lightning forms,

Who heaves old ocean, and who wings the storms;

Pours fierce ambition in a Cæsar's mind,[1047]

Or turns young Ammon[1048] loose to scourge mankind?[1049] 160

From pride, from pride our very reas'ning springs;

Account for moral, as for nat'ral things:[1050]

Why charge we heav'n in those, in these acquit?

In both to reason right is to submit.

Better for us, perhaps, it might appear, 165

Were there all harmony, all virtue here;

That never air or ocean felt the wind;

That never passion discomposed the mind.

But all subsists by elemental strife;

And passions are the elements of life.[1051] 170

The gen'ral order,[1052] since the whole began,

Is kept in nature, and is kept in man.[1053]

[Sidenote: The unreasonableness of the complaints against Providence,

and that to possess more faculties would make us miserable.]

VI. What would this Man? now upward will he soar,

And little less than angel, would be more![1054]

Now looking downwards, just as grieved appears 175

To want the strength[1055] of bulls, the fur of bears.[1056]

Made for his use, all creatures if he call,[1057]

Say what their use, had he the pow'rs of all:

Nature to these without profusion kind,[1058]

The proper organs, proper pow'rs assigned; 180

Each seeming want compensated of course,

Here with degrees of swiftness, there of force:[1059]

All in exact proportion to the state;[1060]

Nothing to add, and nothing to abate.[1061]

Each beast, each insect, happy in its own:[1062] 185

Is Heav'n unkind to man, and man alone?

Shall he alone, whom rational we call,

Be pleased with nothing, if not blessed with all?[1063]

The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find)

Is not to act or think beyond mankind; 190

No pow'rs of body or of soul to share,

But what his nature and his state can bear.[1064]

Why has not man a microscopic eye?

For this plain reason, man is not a fly.

Say what the use, were finer optics giv'n, 195

T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n?[1065]

Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o'er,

To smart and agonize at ev'ry pore?

Or quick effluvia darting through the brain,

Die of a rose in aromatic pain?[1066] 200

If nature thundered in his op'ning ears,

And stunned him with the music of the spheres,[1067]

How would he wish that heav'n had left him still

The whisp'ring zephyr, and the purling rill?

Who finds not Providence all good and wise, 205

Alike in what it gives, and what denies?

[Sidenote: There is an universal order and gradation through the whole

visible world, of the sensible and mental faculties, which causes the

subordination of creature to creature, and of all creatures to man,

whose reason alone countervails all the other faculties.]

VII. Far as creation's ample range extends,

The scale of sensual, mental pow'rs ascends:

Mark how it mounts to man's imperial race,[1068]

From the green myriads in the peopled grass; 210

What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme,

The mole's dim curtain, and the lynx's beam:

Of smell, the headlong lioness between,[1069]

And hound sagacious on the tainted green:

Of hearing, from the life that fills the flood,[1070] 215

To that which warbles through the vernal wood!

The spider's touch how exquisitely fine![1071]

Feels at each thread, and lives along the line:[1072]

In the nice bee, what sense so subtly true

From pois'nous herbs extracts the healing dew?[1073] 220

How instinct varies in the grov'ling swine,

Compared, half-reas'ning elephant, with thine![1074]

'Twixt that and reason, what a nice barrier!

For ever sep'rate, yet for ever near!

Remembrance and reflection how allied; 225

What thin partitions sense from thought divide;[1075]

And middle natures, how they long to join,

Yet never pass th' insuperable line![1076]

Without this just gradation could they be

Subjected, these to those, or all to thee? 230

The pow'rs of all subdued by thee alone,

Is not thy reason all these pow'rs in one?

[Sidenote: How much further this gradation and subordination may extend,

were any part of which broken the whole connected creation must be

destroyed.]

VIII. See, through this air, this ocean, and this earth,

All matter quick, and bursting into birth.

Above, how high progressive life may go! 235

Around, how wide! how deep extend below![1077]

Vast chain of being! which from God began,

Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,[1078]

Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see,

No glass can reach; from infinite to thee, 240

From thee to nothing.[1079] On superior pow'rs

Were we to press, inferior might on ours:[1080]

Or in the full creation leave a void,[1081]

Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroyed:[1082]

From nature's chain whatever link you strike, 245

Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.[1083]

And if each system in gradation roll[1084]

Alike essential to th' amazing whole,[1085]

The least confusion but in one, not all

That system only, but the whole must fall. 250

Let earth unbalanced from her orbit fly,[1086]

Planets and suns run lawless through the sky;[1087]

Let ruling angels from their spheres be hurled,

Being on being wrecked, and world on world;

Heav'n's whole foundations to their centre nod, 255

And nature tremble[1088] to the throne of God![1089]

All this dread order break--for whom? for thee?

Vile-worm!--O madness! pride! impiety![1090]

[Sidenote: The extravagance, impiety, and pride of such a desire.]

IX. What if the foot, ordained the dust to tread,

Or hand, to toil, aspired to be the head? 260

What if the head, the eye, or ear repined

To serve mere engines to the ruling mind?[1091]

Just as absurd for any part to claim

To be another, in this gen'ral frame:[1092]

Just as absurd, to mourn the tasks or pains 265

The great directing Mind of all ordains.[1093]

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,

Whose body nature is, and God the soul;[1094]

That, changed through all, and yet in all the same,

Great in the earth, as in th' ethereal frame, 270

Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,

Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,[1095]

Lives thro' all life, extends through all extent,

Spreads undivided, operates unspent;[1096]

Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,[1097] 275

As full, as perfect in a hair as heart;[1098]

As full, as perfect in vile man that mourns,

As the rapt seraph that adores and burns:[1099]

To him no high, no low, no great, no small;

He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all.[1100] 280

[Sidenote: The consequence of all, the absolute submission due to

Providence, both as to our present and future state.]

X. Cease then, nor order imperfection name:

Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.[1101]

Know thy own point: this kind, this due degree[1102]

Of blindness, weakness, heav'n bestows on thee.

Submit: in this, or any other sphere, 285

Secure to be as blessed as thou canst bear;[1103]

Safe in the hand of one disposing Pow'r,[1104]

Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.

All nature is but art[1105] unknown to thee,[1106]

All chance, direction which thou canst not see;[1107] 290

All discord, harmony not understood;[1108]

All partial evil, universal good;

And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,[1109]

One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

ARGUMENT OF EPISTLE II.

OF THE NATURE AND STATE OF MAN WITH RESPECT TO HIMSELF, AS AN

INDIVIDUAL.

I. The business of man not to pry into God, but to study himself.

His middle nature: his powers and frailties, ver. 1 to 19. The

limits of his capacity, ver. 19, &c. II. The two principles of man,

self-love and reason, both necessary, ver. 53, &c. Self-love the

stronger, and why, ver. 67, &c. Their end the same, ver. 81, &c.

III. The passions, and their use, ver. 93 to 130. The predominant

passion, and its force, ver. 132 to 160. Its necessity, in

directing men to different purposes, ver. 165, &c. Its providential

use, in fixing our principle, and ascertaining our virtue, ver.

177. IV. Virtue and vice joined in our mixed nature; the limits

near, yet the things separate and evident: what is the office of

reason, ver. 202 to 216. V. How odious vice in itself, and how we

deceive ourselves into it, ver. 217. VI. That, however, the ends of

Providence and general good are answered in our passions and

imperfections, ver. 238, &c. How usefully these are distributed to

all orders of men, ver. 241. How useful they are to society, ver.

251. And to individuals, ver. 263. In every state, and every age of

life, ver. 273, &c.

EPISTLE II.

[Sidenote: The business of man not to pry into God, but to study

himself. His middle nature, his power, frailties, and the limits of his

capacity.]

I. Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,[1110]

The proper study of mankind is man.[1111]

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,[1112]

A being darkly wise, and rudely great:

With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,[1113] 5

With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,[1114]

He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;[1115]

In doubt to deem himself a god or beast;[1116]

In doubt his mind or body to prefer;

Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;[1117] 10

Alike in ignorance, his reason such,[1118]

Whether he thinks too little or too much;[1119]

Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;[1120]

Still by himself abused,[1121] or disabused;

Created half to rise, and half to fall;[1122] 15

Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled;

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world![1123]

[1124]Go, wondrous creature! mount[1125] where science guides,

Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides; 20

Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,[1126]

Correct old Time,[1127] and regulate the sun;[1128]

Go, soar with Plato to th' empyreal sphere,

To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;[1129]

Or tread the mazy round his follow'rs trod; 25

And quitting sense call imitating God;[1130]

As eastern priests in giddy circles run,[1131]

And turn their heads to imitate the sun.[1132]

Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule[1133]--

Then drop into thyself, and be a fool! 30

Superior beings, when of late they saw

A mortal man[1134] unfold all nature's law,

Admired such wisdom in an earthly shape,[1135]

And showed a Newton, as we show an ape.[1136]

Could he, whose rules the rapid comet[1137] bind,[1138] 35

Describe or fix one movement of his mind?[1139]

Who saw its fires here rise, and there descend,[1140]

Explain his own beginning or his end?[1141]

Alas! what wonder![1142] man's superior part[1143]

Unchecked may rise, and climb from art to art;[1144] 40

But when his own great work is but begun,

What reason weaves, by passion is undone,[1145]

Trace science then, with modesty thy guide;

First strip off all her equipage of pride;

Deduct what is but vanity or dress, 45

Or learning's luxury, or idleness;

Or tricks to show the stretch of human brain,

Mere curious pleasure, or ingenious pain;

Expunge the whole, or lop th' excrescent parts

Of all[1146] our vices have created arts; 50

Then see how little the remaining sum,

Which served the past, and must the times to come![1147]

[Sidenote: The two principles of man, self-love and reason, both

necessary.]

II. Two principles in human nature reign;

Self-love to urge, and reason to restrain;[1148]

Nor this a good, nor that a bad we call, 55

Each works its end to move or govern all:[1149]

And to their proper operation still[1150]

Ascribe all good; to their improper, ill.

[Sidenote: Self-love the stronger, and why.]

Self-love, the spring of motion, acts[1151] the soul;

Reason's comparing balance rules the whole.[1152] 60

Man, but for that, no action could attend,

And, but for this, were active to no end:

Fixed like a plant on his peculiar spot,

To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot;[1153]

Or, meteor-like, flame lawless through the void,[1154] 65

Destroying others, by himself destroyed.

Most strength the moving principle requires;

Active its task, it prompts, impels, inspires;

Sedate and quiet, the comparing lies,

Formed but to check, delib'rate, and advise. 70

Self-love still stronger, as its objects nigh:

Reason's at distance, and in prospect lie:[1155]

That sees immediate good by present sense;

Reason, the future and the consequence.[1156]

[Sidenote: Their end the same.]

Thicker than arguments, temptations throng, 75

At best more watchful this, but that more strong.

The action of the stronger to suspend,

Reason still use, to reason still attend.

Attention, habit and experience gains;[1157]

Each strengthens reason, and self-love restrains. 80

Let subtle schoolmen teach these friends to fight,

More studious to divide than to unite;

And grace and virtue,[1158] sense[1159] and reason split,[1160]

With all the rash dexterity of wit.

Wits, just like fools, at war about a name, 85

Have full as oft no meaning, or the same.[1161]

Self-love and reason to one end aspire,

Pain their aversion, pleasure their desire;[1162]

[Sidenote: The passions and their use.]

But greedy that, its object would devour,

This taste the honey, and not wound the flow'r: 90

Pleasure, or wrong or rightly understood,

Our greatest evil, or our greatest good.

III. Modes of self-love the passions we may call;

'Tis real good, or seeming, moves them all:[1163]

But since not ev'ry good we can divide, 95

And reason bids us for our own provide,

Passions, though selfish, if their means be fair,[1164]

List[1165] under reason, and deserve her care;

Those, that imparted, court[1166] a nobler aim,

Exalt their kind, and take some virtue's name.[1167] 100

In lazy apathy let stoics boast

Their virtue fixed;[1168] 'tis fixed as in a frost;[1169]

Contracted all, retiring to the breast;[1170]

But strength of mind is exercise, not rest:[1171]

The rising tempest puts in act the soul,[1172] 105

Parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole.[1173]

On life's vast ocean diversely we sail,[1174]

Reason the card,[1175] but passion is the gale;[1176]

Nor God alone in the still calm we find,

He mounts the storms, and walks upon the wind.[1177] 110

[Sidenote: The predominant passion and its force.]

Passions, like elements, though born to fight,

Yet, mixed and softened, in his work unite:[1178]

These, 'tis enough to temper and employ;

But what composes man, can man destroy?[1179]

Suffice that reason keep to nature's road, 115

Subject, compound them, follow her and God.[1180]

Love, hope, and joy, fair pleasure's smiling train,

Hate, fear, and grief, the family of pain,[1181]

These mixed with art,[1182] and to due bounds confined,

Make and maintain the balance of the mind: 120

The lights and shades, whose well-accorded strife[1183]

Gives all the strength and colour of our life.

Pleasures are ever in our hands or eyes;

And when in act they cease, in prospect rise:

Present to grasp, and future still to find,[1184] 125

The whole employ of body and of mind.[1185]

All spread their charms, but charm not all alike;

On diff'rent senses diff'rent objects strike;[1186]

Hence diff'rent passions more or less inflame,

As strong or weak the organs of the frame;[1187] 130

And hence one master passion in the breast,

Like Aaron's serpent, swallows up the rest.[1188]

As man, perhaps, the moment of his breath,

Receives the lurking principle of death;

The young disease, that must subdue at length, 135

Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength:

So, cast and mingled with his very frame,[1189]

The mind's disease, its ruling passion, came;

Each vital humour which should feed the whole,

Soon flows to this, in body and in soul: 140

Whatever warms the heart, or fills the head,

As the mind opens, and its functions spread,

Imagination plies her dang'rous art,

And pours it all upon the peccant part.[1190]

Nature its mother, habit is its nurse; 145

Wit, spirit, faculties,[1191] but make it worse;

Reason itself but gives it edge and pow'r;[1192]

As heav'n's bless'd beam turns vinegar more sour.[1193]

We, wretched subjects, though to lawful sway,[1194]

In this weak queen some fav'rite still obey; 150

Ah! if she lend not arms as well as rules,

What can she more[1195] than tell us we are fools?

Teach us to mourn our nature, not to mend,

A sharp accuser, but a helpless friend!

Or from a judge turn pleader, to persuade 155

The choice we make, or justify it made;[1196]

Proud of an easy conquest all along,

She but removes weak passions for the strong.[1197]

So when small humours gather to a gout,

The doctor fancies he has driv'n them out.[1198] 160

Yes, nature's road must ever be preferred;

Reason is here no guide, but still a guard;

'Tis hers to rectify, not overthrow,

And treat this passion more as friend than foe:

[Sidenote: Its necessity in directing men to different purposes.]

A mightier pow'r the strong direction sends,[1199] 165

And sev'ral men impels to sev'ral ends:[1200]

Like varying winds, by other passions tossed,

This drives them constant to a certain coast.[1201]

Let pow'r or knowledge, gold or glory, please,

Or (oft more strong than all) the love of ease;[1202] 170

Through life 'tis followed, ev'en at life's expense;

The merchant's toil, the sage's indolence,

The monk's humility, the hero's pride,

All, all alike find reason on their side.

[Sidenote: Its providential use in fixing our principle, and

ascertaining our virtue.]

Th' Eternal Art, educing good from ill,[1203] 175

Grafts on this passion our best principle:

'Tis thus the mercury of man is fixed,[1204]

Strong grows the virtue with his nature mixed;

The dross cements what else were too refined,

And in one int'rest body acts with mind. 180

As fruits, ungrateful to the planter's care,

On savage stocks inserted learn to bear,[1205]

The surest virtues thus from passions shoot,[1206]

Wild nature's vigour working at the root.[1207]

What crops of wit and honesty appear 185

From spleen, from obstinacy, hate or fear![1208]

See anger, zeal and fortitude supply;[1209]

Ev'n av'rice, prudence; sloth, philosophy;

Lust, through some certain strainers well refined,

Is gentle love, and charms all womankind; 190

Envy, to which th' ignoble mind's a slave,

Is emulation in the learn'd or brave;[1210]

Nor virtue, male or female, can we name,

But what will grow on pride,[1211] or grow on shame.[1212]

[Sidenote: Virtue and vice joined in our mixed nature; the limits near,

yet the things separate and evident. The office of reason.]

[1213]Thus nature gives us (let it check our pride)[1214] 195

The virtue nearest to our vice allied;[1215]

Reason the bias turns to good from ill,[1216]

And Nero reigns a Titus if he will.[1217]

The fiery soul abhorred in Catiline,

In Decius charms, in Curtius is divine:[1218] 200

The same ambition can destroy or save,

And makes a patriot as it makes a knave.[1219]

This light and darkness in our chaos joined,

What shall divide? The god within the mind.[1220]

Extremes in nature equal ends produce, 205

In man they join to some mysterious use;[1221]

Though each by turns the other's bound invade,

As, in some well-wrought picture, light and shade,[1222]

And oft so mix, the diff'rence is too nice[1223]

Where ends the virtue, or begins the vice. 210

Fools! who from hence into the notion fall,

That vice or virtue there is none at all.

If white and black blend, soften, and unite

A thousand ways, is there no black or white?[1224]

Ask your own heart, and nothing is so plain; 215

'Tis to mistake them costs the time and pain.[1225]

[Sidenote: Vice odious in itself and how we deceive ourselves into it.]

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,

As to be hated needs but to be seen;[1226]

Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,

We first endure, then pity,[1227] then embrace.[1228] 220

But where th' extreme of vice, was ne'er agreed:

Ask where's the North? at York, 'tis on the Tweed;

In Scotland, at the Orcades; and there,

At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where.

No creature owns it in the first degree, 225

But thinks his neighbour farther gone than he;[1229]

Ev'n those who dwell beneath its very zone,[1230]

Or never feel the rage, or never own;[1231]

What happier natures shrink at with affright,

The hard inhabitant contends is right.[1232] 230

[Sidenote: The ends of Providence, and general good, answered in our

passions and imperfections. How usefully these are distributed to all

orders of men.]

Virtuous and vicious ev'ry man must be,

Few in th' extreme, but all in the degree:[1233]

The rogue and fool by fits is fair and wise;

And ev'n the best, by fits, what they despise.[1234]

'Tis but by parts we follow good or ill; 235

For, vice or virtue, self directs it still;[1235]

Each individual seeks a sev'ral goal;

But heav'n's great view is one, and that the whole.

That counterworks each folly and caprice;

That disappoints th' effect of ev'ry vice;[1236] 240

That, happy frailties to all ranks applied,[1237]

Shame to the virgin,[1238] to the matron pride,

Fear to the statesman, rashness to the chief,

To kings presumption, and to crowds belief:

That virtue's ends from vanity can raise, 245

Which seeks no interest, no reward but praise;[1239]

And build[1240] on wants, and on defects of mind,

The joy, the peace, the glory of mankind.

[Sidenote: How useful these are to society in general:]

Heav'n forming each on other to depend,

A master, or a servant, or a friend, 250

Bids each on other for assistance call,

Till one man's weakness grows the strength of all.

Wants, frailties, passions, closer still ally

The common int'rest, or endear the tie.

To these we owe true friendship, love sincere, 255

Each home-felt joy that life inherits here;[1241]

Yet from the same we learn, in its decline,

Those joys, those loves, those int'rests to resign:[1242]

Taught half by reason, half by mere decay,

To welcome death, and calmly pass away. 260

[Sidenote: And to individuals in particular in every state:]

Whate'er the passion,--knowledge, fame, or pelf,--

Not one will change his neighbour with himself.[1243]

The learn'd is happy nature to explore,[1244]

The fool is happy that he knows no more;

The rich is happy in the plenty giv'n, 265

The poor contents him with the care of heav'n.

See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,

The sot a hero, lunatic a king;

The starving chemist in his golden views

Supremely blessed,[1245] the poet in his muse.[1246] 270

[Sidenote: And in every age of life.]

See some strange comfort ev'ry state attend,

And pride bestowed on all, a common friend:[1247]

See some fit passion ev'ry age supply,

Hope travels through, nor quits us when we die.[1248]

Behold the child, by nature's kindly law[1249] 275

Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw:

Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,

A little louder,[1250] but as empty quite:

Scarfs, garters,[1251] gold, amuse his riper stage,[1252]

And beads[1253] and pray'r-books are the toys of age: 280

Pleased with this bauble still, as that before;

Till tired he sleeps, and life's poor play is o'er.[1254]

Mean while[1255] opinion gilds with varying rays

Those painted clouds that beautify our days;[1256]

Each want of happiness by hope supplied, 285

And each vacuity of sense by pride:[1257]

These build as fast as knowledge can destroy;[1258]

In folly's cup still laughs the bubble, joy;

One prospect lost, another still we gain;[1259]

And not a vanity is giv'n in vain;[1260] 290

Ev'n mean self-love becomes, by force divine,

The scale to measure others' wants by thine.[1261]

See, and confess, one comfort still must rise;[1262]

'Tis this, though man's a fool, yet God is wise![1263]

ARGUMENT OF EPISTLE III.

OF THE NATURE AND STATE OF MAN WITH RESPECT TO SOCIETY.

I. The whole universe one system of society, ver. 7, &c. Nothing made

wholly for itself, nor yet wholly for another, ver. 27. The happiness of

animals mutual, ver. 49. II. Reason or instinct operate alike to the

good of each individual, ver. 79. III. Reason or instinct operate also

to society in all animals, ver. 109. How far society carried by

instinct, ver. 115. How much farther by reason, ver. 131. IV. Of that

which is called the state of nature, ver. 144. Reason instructed by

instinct in the invention of arts, ver. 169, and in the forms of

society, ver. 179. V. Origin of political societies, ver. 199. Origin of

monarchy, ver. 207. VI. Patriarchal government, ver. 215. Origin of true

religion and government, from the same principle of love, 231, &c.

Origin of superstition and tyranny, from the same principle of fear,

ver. 241, &c. The influence of self-love operating to the social and

public good, ver. 269. Restoration of true religion and government on

their first principle, ver. 283. Mixed government, ver. 288. Various

forms of each, and the true end of all, ver. 303, &c. EPISTLE III.

[Sidenote: The whole universe one system of society.]

I. Here then we rest: "The Universal Cause[1264]

Acts to one end,[1265] but acts by various laws."[1266]

In all the madness of superfluous health,

The trim of pride, the impudence of wealth,[1267]

Let this great truth be present night and day: 5

But most be present if we preach or pray.

Look round our world, behold the chain of love[1268]

Combining all below and all above.

See plastic nature working to this end,[1269]

The single atoms each to other tend, 10

Attract, attracted to, the next in place

Formed and impelled its neighbour to embrace.[1270]

See matter next with various life endued,

Press to one centre still, the gen'ral good.[1271]

See dying vegetables life sustain, 15

See life dissolving vegetate again:[1272]

All forms that perish other forms supply,

(By turns we catch the vital breath and die[1273])

Like bubbles on the sea of matter born,

They rise, they break, and to that sea return. 20

Nothing is foreign; parts relate to whole;

One all-extending, all-preserving soul

Connects each being, greatest with the least;[1274]

Made beast in aid of man, and man of beast;[1275]

All served, all serving: nothing stands alone; 25

The chain holds on, and where it ends unknown.

[Sidenote: Nothing made wholly for itself, nor yet wholly for another,

but the happiness of all animals mutual.]

Has God, thou fool! worked solely for thy good,

Thy joy, thy pastime, thy attire, thy food?

Who for thy table feeds the wanton fawn,

For him as kindly spreads the flow'ry lawn:[1276] 30

Is it for thee the lark ascends and sings?

Joy tunes his voice, joy elevates his wings.

Is it for thee the linnet pours his throat?

Loves of his own and raptures[1277] swell the note.

The bounding steed you pompously[1278] bestride, 35

Shares with his lord the pleasure and the pride.

Is thine alone the seed that strews the plain?

The birds of heav'n shall vindicate their grain.

Thine the full harvest of the golden year?

Part pays, and justly, the deserving steer; 40

The hog, that ploughs not, nor obeys thy call,

Lives on the labours of this lord of all.[1279]

Know, nature's children all divide her care;

The fur that warms a monarch[1280] warmed a bear.[1281]

While man exclaims, "See all things for my use!" 45

"See man for mine!" replies a pampered goose:[1282]

And just as short of reason he must fall,

Who thinks all made for one, not one for all.[1283]

Grant that the pow'rful still the weak control;

Be man the wit,[1284] and tyrant of the whole: 50

Nature that tyrant checks; he only knows,[1285]

And helps, another creature's wants and woes.[1286]

Say, will the falcon, stooping from above,

Smit with her varying[1287] plumage, spare the dove?

Admires the jay the insect's gilded wings? 55

Or hears the hawk when Philomela sings?[1288]

Man cares for all: to birds he gives his woods,

To beasts his pastures, and to fish his floods.

For some his int'rest prompts him to provide,

For more his pleasure, yet for more his pride: 60

All feed on one vain patron, and enjoy

Th' extensive blessing of his luxury.[1289]

That very life his learned hunger craves,

He saves from famine, from the savage saves;

Nay, feasts the animal he dooms his feast, 65

And, till he ends the being, makes it blessed,

Which sees no more the stroke, or feels the pain,

Than favoured man by touch ethereal[1290] slain.[1291]

The creature had his feast of life before;

Thou too must perish, when thy feast is o'er! 70

To each unthinking being, heav'n, a friend,

Gives not the useless knowledge of its end:

To man imparts it; but with such a view[1292]

As, while he dreads it, makes him hope it too;

The hour concealed, and so remote the fear, 75

Death still draws nearer, never seeming near.

Great standing miracle! that heav'n assigned

Its only thinking thing[1293] this turn of mind.[1294]

[Sidenote: Reason or instinct alike operate to the good of each

individual.]

II. Whether with reason, or with instinct blessed,

Know, all enjoy that pow'r which suits them best:[1295] 80

To bliss alike by that direction tend,

And find the means proportion'd to their end.

Say, where full instinct is th' unerring guide,

What pope or council[1296] can they need beside?[1297]

Reason, however able, cool at best, 85

Cares not for service, or but serves when pressed,

Stays till we call, and then not often near;[1298]

But honest instinct comes a volunteer,

Sure never to o'ershoot, but just to hit,

While still too wide or short is human wit; 90

Sure by quick nature happiness to gain,

Which heavier reason labours at in vain.[1299]

This too serves always, reason never long;

One must go right,[1300] the other may go wrong.

See then the acting and comparing pow'rs 95

One in their nature, which are two in ours;[1301]

And reason raise o'er instinct as you can,[1302]

In this 'tis God directs, in that 'tis man.[1303]

Who taught the nations of the field and flood[1304]

To shun their poison,[1305] and to choose their food?[1306] 100

Prescient, the tides or tempests to withstand,

Build on the wave,[1307] or arch beneath the sand?

Who made the spider parallels design,[1308]

Sure as Demoivre,[1309] without rule or line?[1310]

Who bid the stork, Columbus-like, explore 105

Heav'ns not his own, and worlds unknown before?[1311]

Who calls the council, states the certain day,[1312]

Who forms the phalanx, and who points the way?[1313]

[Sidenote: Reason or instinct operate also to society in all animals.]

III. God, in the nature of each being, founds

Its proper bliss, and sets its proper bounds: 110

But as he framed a whole, the whole to bless,

On mutual wants built mutual happiness:[1314]

So from the first, eternal order ran,

And creature linked to creature, man to man.

[Sidenote: How far society carried by instinct.]

Whate'er of life all-quick'ning ether[1315] keeps, 115

Or breathes through air, or shoots beneath the deeps,

Or pours profuse on earth, one nature feeds

The vital flame, and swells the genial seeds.

Not man alone, but all that roam the wood,

Or wing the sky, or roll along the flood, 120

Each loves itself, but not itself alone,

Each sex desires alike, till two are one.

Nor ends the pleasure with the fierce embrace:

They love themselves a third time in their race.[1316]

Thus beast and bird their common charge attend, 125

The mothers nurse it, and the sires defend;[1317]

The young dismissed to wander earth or air,

There stops the instinct, and there ends the care:[1318]

The link dissolves, each seeks a fresh embrace,

Another love succeeds, another race. 130

[Sidenote: How much farther society is carried by reason.]

A longer care man's helpless kind demands;

That longer care contracts more lasting bands:[1319]

Reflection, reason, still the ties improve,

At once extend the int'rest, and the love;[1320]

With choice we fix,[1321] with sympathy we burn; 135

Each virtue in each passion takes its turn;[1322]

And still new needs, new helps, new habits rise,

That graft benevolence on charities.[1323]

Still as one brood, and as another rose,

These nat'ral love maintained, habitual those:[1324] 140

The last scarce ripened into perfect man,

Saw helpless him from whom their life began:[1325]

Mem'ry and forecast just returns engage,

That pointed back to youth, this on to age;

While pleasure, gratitude, and hope combined, 145

Still spread the int'rest, and preserved the kind.[1326]

[Sidenote: Of the state of nature that it was social.]

IV. Nor think in nature's state they blindly trod;

The state of nature was the reign of God:[1327]

Self-love and social at her birth[1328] began,

Union[1329] the bond of all things, and of man. 150

Pride then was not; nor arts, that pride to aid;

Man walked with beast joint tenant of the shade;[1330]

The same his table, and the same his bed;

No murder clothed him,[1331] and no murder fed.

In the same temple, the resounding wood,[1332] 155

All vocal beings hymned their equal God:[1333]

The shrine with gore unstained, with gold undressed,

Unbribed, unbloody, stood the blameless priest:[1334]

Heav'n's attribute was universal care,

And man's prerogative to rule, but spare. 160

Ah! how unlike the man of times to come![1335]

Of half that live the butcher and the tomb;[1336]

Who, foe to nature, hears the gen'ral groan,

Murders their species, and betrays his own.[1337]

But just disease to luxury succeeds, 165

And ev'ry death its own avenger breeds;

The fury-passions from that blood began,

And turned on man a fiercer savage,[1338] man.[1339]

[Sidenote: Reason instructed by instinct in the invention of arts, and

in the forms of society.]

See him from nature rising slow to art![1340]

To copy instinct then was reason's part; 170

Thus then to man the voice of nature spake[1341]--

"Go, from the creatures thy instructions take:

Learn from the birds what food the thickets yield;[1342]

Learn from the beasts the physic of the field;[1343]

Thy arts of building from the bee receive;[1344] 175

Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave;[1345]

Learn of the little nautilus to sail,

Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale.[1346]

Here too all forms of social union find,

And hence let reason, late, instruct mankind:[1347] 180

Here subterranean works and cities see;

There towns aërial on the waving tree.

Learn each small people's genius, policies,

The ants' republic, and the realm of bees:

How those in common all their wealth bestow,[1348] 185

And anarchy without confusion know;[1349]

And these for ever, though a monarch reign,

Their sep'rate cells and properties maintain.[1350]

Mark what unvaried laws preserve each state,

Laws wise as nature, and as fixed as fate. 190

In vain thy reason finer webs shall draw,

Entangle justice in her net of law,

And right, too rigid, harden into wrong;[1351]

Still for the strong too weak, the weak too strong.[1352]

Yet go! and thus o'er all the creatures sway, 195

Thus let the wiser make the rest obey;

And for those arts mere instinct could afford,

Be crowned as monarchs, or as gods adored."[1353]

[Sidenote: Origin of political societies.]

V. Great nature spoke; observant man obeyed;

Cities were built, societies were made:[1354] 200

Here rose one little state; another near[1355]

Grew by like means, and joined through love or fear.

Did here the trees with ruddier burdens bend,

And there the streams in purer rills descend?

What war could ravish, commerce could bestow, 205

And he returned a friend who came a foe.

Converse and love mankind might strongly draw,[1356]

When love was liberty, and nature law.[1357]

[Sidenote: Origin of monarchy.]

Thus states were formed: the name of king unknown,

Till common int'rest placed the sway in one.[1358] 210

'Twas virtue only (or in arts or arms,

Diffusing blessings, or averting harms),

The same which in a sire the sons obeyed,[1359]

A prince the father of a people made.[1360]

[Sidenote: Origin of patriarchal government.]

VI. Till then, by nature crowned, each patriarch sat, 215

King, priest, and parent of his growing state;[1361]

On him, their second Providence, they hung,

Their law his eye, their oracle his tongue.

He from the wond'ring furrow called the food,[1362]

Taught to command the fire, control the flood, 220

Draw forth the monsters of th' abyss profound,

Or fetch th' aërial eagle to the ground,[1363]

Till drooping, sick'ning, dying they began[1364]

Whom they revered as god to mourn as man:

Then, looking up from sire to sire, explored 225

One great first Father, and that first adored;[1365]

Or plain tradition, that this all begun,[1366]

Conveyed unbroken faith from sire to son;

The worker from the work distinct was known,

And simple reason never sought but one.[1367] 230

Ere wit oblique had broke that steady light,[1368]

Man, like his Maker, saw that all was right;[1369]

To virtue, in the paths of pleasure trod,

And owned a father when he owned a God.[1370]

[Sidenote: Origin of true religion and government from the principle of

love; and of superstition and tyranny from that of fear.]

Love all the faith, and all th' allegiance then, 235

For nature knew no right divine in men,[1371]

No ill could fear in God; and understood

A sov'reign being but a sov'reign good.

True faith, true policy, united ran,

That was but love of God, and this of man. 240

Who first taught souls enslaved, and realms undone,

Th' enormous[1372] faith of many made for one;

That proud exception to all nature's laws,

T' invert the world, and counterwork its cause?[1373]

Force first made conquest, and that conquest, law; 245

Till superstition taught the tyrant awe,[1374]

Then shared the tyranny, then lent it aid,

And gods of conqu'rors, slaves of subjects made:

She, midst the lightning's blaze, and thunder's sound,

When rocked the mountains, and when groaned the ground,[1375]

She taught the weak to bend, the proud to pray, 251

To pow'r unseen, and mightier far than they:

She, from the rending earth and bursting skies,

Saw gods descend, and fiends infernal rise:[1376]

Here fixed the dreadful, there the bless'd abodes; 255

Fear made her devils, and weak hope her gods;

Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust,

Whose attributes were rage, revenge, or lust;[1377]

Such as the souls of cowards might conceive,

And, formed like tyrants, tyrants would believe.[1378] 260

Zeal then, not charity, became the guide;

And hell was built on spite, and heav'n on pride.

Then sacred seemed th' ethereal vault no more;[1379]

Altars grew marble then, and reeked with gore:[1380]

Then first the Flamen[1381] tasted living food;[1382] 265

Next his grim idol smeared with human blood;[1383]

With heav'n's own thunders shook the world below,

And played the god an engine on his foe.[1384]

[Sidenote: The influence of self-love operating to the social and public

good.]

So drives self-love, through just, and through unjust,

To one man's pow'r, ambition, lucre, lust: 270

The same self-love, in all, becomes the cause

Of what restrains him, government and laws.[1385]

For what one likes, if others like as well,

What serves one will, when many wills rebel?

How shall he keep, what, sleeping or awake, 275

A weaker may surprise, a stronger take?[1386]

His safety must his liberty restrain:

All join to guard what each desires to gain.

Forced into virtue thus by self-defence,

Ev'n kings learned justice and benevolence: 280

Self-love forsook the path it first pursued,

And found the private in the public good.[1387]

[Sidenote: Restoration of true religion and government on their first

principle.]

'Twas then the studious head or gen'rous mind,

Foll'wer of God, or friend of human-kind,

Poet or patriot[1388], rose but to restore

The faith and moral nature gave before; 285

Relumed her ancient light, not kindled new;

If not God's image, yet his shadow drew:

Taught pow'r's due use to people and to kings;

Taught not to slack, nor strain its tender strings, 290

[Sidenote: Mixed government.]

The less, or greater, set so justly true,

That touching one must strike the other too;[1389]

Till jarring int'rests of themselves create

Th' according music[1390] of a well-mixed state.[1391]

Such is the world's great harmony, that springs 295

From order, union, full consent[1392] of things;[1393]

Where small and great, where weak and mighty made

To serve, not suffer, strengthen, not invade;[1394]

More pow'rful each as needful to the rest,

And in proportion as it blesses, bless'd; 300

Draw to one point, and to one centre bring

Beast, man, or angel, servant, lord, or king.

[Sidenote: Various forms of each, and the true use of all.]

For forms of government let fools contest;

Whate'er is best administered is best;[1395]

For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight; 305

His can't be wrong whose life is in the right:[1396]

In faith and hope the world will disagree,[1397]

But all mankind's concern is charity:[1398]

All must be false that thwart this one great end;

And all of God, that bless mankind, or mend. 310

Man, like the gen'rous vine, supported lives;

The strength he gains is from th' embrace he gives.[1399]

On their own axis as the planets run,

Yet make at once[1400] their circle round the sun,[1401]

So two consistent motions act the soul, 315

And one regards itself, and one the whole.

Thus God and nature[1402] linked the gen'ral frame,

And bade self-love and social be the same.[1403]

ARGUMENT OF EPISTLE IV.

OF THE NATURE AND STATE OF MAN WITH RESPECT TO HAPPINESS.

I. False notions of happiness, philosophical and popular, answered from

ver. 19 to 26. II. It is the end of all men, and attainable by all, ver.

29. God intends happiness to be equal; and, to be so, it must be social,

since all particular happiness depends on general, and since he governs

by general, not particular laws, ver. 35. As it is necessary for order,

and the peace and welfare of society, that external goods should be

unequal, happiness is not made to consist in these, ver. 49. But

notwithstanding that inequality, the balance of happiness among mankind

is kept even by Providence, by the two passions of hope and fear, ver.

67. III. What the happiness of individuals is, as far as is consistent

with the constitution of this world; and that the good man has here the

advantage, ver. 77. The error of imputing to virtue what are only the

calamities of nature, or of fortune, ver. 93. IV. The folly of expecting

that God should alter his general laws in favour of particulars, ver.

121. V. That we are not judges who are good; but that whoever they are,

they must be happiest, ver. 131, &c. VI. That external goods are not the

proper rewards, but often inconsistent with, or destructive of virtue,

ver. 167. That even these can make no man happy without virtue:

instanced in riches, ver. 185. Honours, ver. 193. Nobility, ver. 205.

Greatness, ver. 217. Fame, ver. 237. Superior talents, ver. 259, &c.

With pictures of human infelicity in men possessed of them all, ver.

269, &c. VII. That virtue only constitutes a happiness whose object is

universal, and whose prospect eternal, ver. 309. That the perfection of

virtue and happiness consists in a conformity to the order of Providence

here, and a resignation to it here and hereafter, ver. 327, &c.

EPISTLE IV.

O Happiness! our being's end and aim,[1404]

Good, pleasure, ease, content! whate'er thy name:

That something still which prompts th' eternal sigh,

For which we bear to live, or dare to die;

Which still so near us, yet beyond us lies, 5

O'erlooked, seen double by the fool and wise:[1405]

Plant of celestial seed! if dropped below,[1406]

Say, in what mortal soil thou deign'st to grow?[1407]

Fair op'ning to some court's propitious shine,[1408]

Or deep with diamonds in the flaming[1409] mine? 10

Twined with the wreaths Parnassian laurels yield,

Or reaped in iron harvests of the field?[1410]

Where grows!--where grows it not?[1411] If vain our toil,

We ought to blame the culture, not the soil:[1412]

Fixed to no spot is happiness sincere,[1413] 15

'Tis no where to be found, or ev'ry where:

'Tis never to be bought, but always free;

And, fled from monarchs, St. John! dwells with thee.[1414]

Ask of the learn'd the way! The learn'd are blind;

This bids to serve, and that to shun mankind; 20

Some place the bliss in action,[1415] some in ease,[1416]

Those call it pleasure, and contentment these;

Some sunk to beasts find pleasure end in pain;[1417]

Some swelled to gods confess e'en virtue vain;[1418]

Or indolent, to each extreme they fall, 25

To trust in ev'ry thing, or doubt of all.[1419]

Who thus define it, say they more or less

Than this, that happiness is happiness?[1420]

[Sidenote: Happiness is the end of all men, and attainable by all.]

Take nature's path,[1421] and mad opinion's leave;

All states can reach it, and all heads conceive; 30

Obvious her goods, in no extreme they dwell;[1422]

There needs but thinking right, and meaning well;[1423]

And mourn our various portions as we please,

Equal is common sense,[1424] and common ease.[1425]

[Sidenote: God governs by general not particular laws; intends happiness

to be equal, and to be so it must be social, since all particular

happiness depends on general.]

Remember, man, "the Universal Cause 35

Acts not by partial, but by gen'ral laws;"

And makes what happiness we justly call,[1426]

Subsist, not in the good of one, but all.

There's not a blessing individuals find,

But some way leans and hearkens[1427] to the kind;[1428] 40

No bandit fierce, no tyrant mad with pride,

No caverned hermit rests self-satisfied:

Who most to shun or hate mankind pretend,

Seek an admirer, or would fix a friend.

Abstract what others feel, what others think, 45

All pleasures sicken, and all glories sink:

Each has his share; and who would more obtain,

Shall find the pleasure pays not half the pain.[1429]

[Sidenote: It is necessary for order, and the common peace, that

external goods be unequal, therefore happiness is not constituted in

these.]

Order is heav'n's first law; and this confessed,

Some are, and must be, greater than the rest, 50

More rich, more wise; but who infers from hence

That such are happier, shocks all common sense.[1430]

Heav'n to mankind impartial we confess,

If all are equal in their happiness:

But mutual wants this happiness increase; 55

All nature's diff'rence keeps all nature's peace.

Condition, circumstance is not the thing;

Bliss is the same in subject or in king,

In who obtain defence, or who defend,

In him who is, or him who finds a friend: 60

Heav'n breathes through ev'ry member of the whole

One common blessing, as one common soul.

But fortune's gifts if each alike possessed,

And each were equal, must not all contest?

If then to all men happiness was meant, 65

God in externals could not place content.[1431]

[Sidenote: The balance of human happiness kept equal, notwithstanding

externals, by hope and fear.]

Fortune her gifts may variously dispose,

And these be happy called, unhappy those;

But heav'n's just balance equal will appear,

While those are placed in hope, and these in fear:[1432] 70

Not present good or ill, the joy or curse,

But future views of better, or of worse.[1433]

O sons of earth! attempt ye still to rise,

By mountains piled on mountains, to the skies?[1434]

Heav'n still[1435] with laughter the vain toil surveys,[1436] 75

And buries madmen in the heaps they raise.[1437]

[Sidenote: In what the happiness of individuals consists, and that the

good man has the advantage even in this world.]

Know, all the good that individuals find,

Or God and nature[1438] meant to mere mankind,[1439]

Reason's whole pleasure, all the joys of sense,

Lie in three words, health, peace, and competence.[1440] 80

But health consists with temperance alone;

And peace! O virtue! peace is all thy own.[1441]

The good or bad the gifts of fortune gain;

But these less taste them, as they worse obtain.[1442]

Say, in pursuit of profit or delight, 85

Who risk the most, that[1443] take wrong means or right?

Of vice or virtue, whether blessed or cursed,

Which meets contempt, or which compassion first?[1444]

Count all th' advantage prosp'rous vice attains,

'Tis but what virtue flies from and disdains: 90

And grant the bad what happiness they would,

One they must want,[1445] which is to pass for good.[1446]

[Sidenote: That no man is unhappy through virtue.]

O blind to truth, and God's whole scheme below,

Who fancy bliss to vice,[1447] to virtue woe!

Who sees and follows that great scheme the best, 95

Best knows the blessing, and will most be blessed.

But fools the good alone unhappy call,

For ills or accidents that chance to all.

See Falkland dies, the virtuous and the just!

See god-like Turenne prostrate on the dust! 100

See Sidney bleeds amid the martial strife!

Was this their virtue, or contempt of life?[1448]

Say, was it virtue, more though heav'n ne'er gave,

Lamented Digby![1449] sunk thee to the grave?[1450]

Tell me, if virtue made the son expire, 105

Why, full of days and honour, lives the sire?[1451]

Why drew Marseilles' good bishop[1452] purer breath,

When nature sickened, and each gale was death?[1453]

Or why so long (in life if long can be)[1454]

Lent heav'n a parent to the poor and me?[1455] 110

What makes all physical or moral ill?

There deviates nature, and here wanders will.

God sends not ill, if rightly understood,

Or partial ill is universal good,

Or change admits, or nature lets it fall 115

Short, and but rare, till man improved it all.[1456]

We just as wisely might of heav'n complain,

That righteous Abel was destroyed by Cain,

As that the virtuous son is ill at ease

When his lewd father gave the dire disease. 120

Think we, like some weak prince, th' Eternal Cause,

Prone for his fav'rites to reverse his laws?[1457]

Shall burning Ætna, if a sage requires,[1458]

Forget to thunder, and recall her fires?[1459]

On air or sea new motions be impressed,[1460] 125

O blameless Bethel! to relieve thy breast?[1461]

When the loose mountain trembles from on high,

Shall gravitation cease if you go by?[1462]

Or some old temple nodding to its fall,

For Chartres' head reserve the hanging wall?[1463] 130

But still this world, so fitted for the knave,

Contents us not. A better shall we have?

A kingdom of the just then let it be:[1464]

But first consider how those just agree.

The good must merit God's peculiar care; 135

But who, but God, can tell us who they are?

One thinks on Calvin heav'n's own Spirit fell;

Another deems him instrument of hell;

If Calvin feel heav'n's blessing, or its rod,

This cries there is, and that, there is no God.[1465] 140

What shocks one part will edify the rest,[1466]

Nor with one system can they all be blessed.[1467]

The very best will variously incline,[1468]

And what rewards your virtue, punish mine.

Whatever is, is right.[1469] This world, 'tis true, 145

Was made for Cæsar, but for Titus too:[1470]

And which more bless'd? who chained his country, say,

Or he whose virtue sighed to lose a day?[1471]

"But sometimes virtue starves, while vice is fed."

What then? Is the reward of virtue bread?[1472] 150

That vice may merit, 'tis the price of toil;[1473]

The knave deserves it when he tills the soil,

The knave deserves it when he tempts the main,

Where folly fights for kings, or dives for gain.[1474]

The good man may be weak, be indolent; 155

Nor is his claim to plenty, but content.

But grant him riches, your demand is o'er?

"No--shall the good want health, the good want pow'r?"

Add health, and pow'r, and ev'ry earthly thing:

"Why bounded pow'r? why private? why no king?[1475] 160

Nay, why external for internal giv'n?

Why is not man a god, and earth a heav'n?"[1476]

Who ask and reason thus, will scarce conceive

God gives enough while he has more to give:[1477]

Immense the pow'r, immense were the demand; 165

Say, at what part of nature will they stand?

[Sidenote: That external goods are not the proper rewards of virtue,

often inconsistent with, or destructive of it; but that all these can

make no man happy without virtue. Instances in each of them.]

What nothing earthly gives or can destroy,

The soul's calm sunshine, and the heartfelt joy,

Is virtue's prize. A better would you fix?

Then give humility a coach and six,[1478] 170

Justice a conqu'ror's sword, or truth a gown,[1479]

Or public spirit its great cure,[1480] a crown.[1481]

Weak, foolish man! will heav'n[1482] reward us there,[1483]

With the same trash mad mortals wish for here?

The boy and man an individual makes,[1484] 175

Yet sigh'st thou now for apples and for cakes?

Go, like the Indian, in another life

Expect thy dog, thy bottle, and thy wife,

As well as dream such trifles are assigned,

As toys and empires, for a god-like mind: 180

Rewards, that either would to virtue bring

No joy, or be destructive of the thing:

How oft by these at sixty are undone

The virtues of a saint at twenty-one!

[Sidenote: 1. Riches.]

To whom can riches give repute or trust,[1485] 185

Content, or pleasure, but the good and just?[1486]

Judges and senates have been bought for gold,

Esteem and love were never to be sold.[1487]

O fool! to think God hates the worthy mind,

The lover and the love of human kind,[1488] 190

Whose life is healthful, and whose conscience clear,

Because he wants a thousand pounds a year.[1489]

[Sidenote: 2. Honours.]

Honour and shame from no condition rise;

Act well your part, there all the honour lies.

Fortune in men has some small diff'rence made, 195

One flaunts in rags, one flutters in brocade;[1490]

The cobbler aproned,[1491] and the parson gowned,

The friar hooded, and the monarch crowned.

"What differ more," you cry, "than crown and cowl?"

I'll tell you, friend; a wise man and a fool.[1492] 200

You'll find, if once the monarch acts the monk,[1493]

Or, cobbler-like, the parson will be drunk,

Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow;

The rest is all but leather or prunella.[1494]

[Sidenote: 3. Titles.]

Stuck o'er with titles, and hung round with strings,[1495] 205

That thou may'st be by kings, or whores of kings.[1496]

[Sidenote: 4. Birth.]

Boast the pure blood of an illustrious race,[1497]

In quiet flow from Lucrece to Lucrece:[1498]

But by your fathers' worth if yours you rate,

Count me those only who were good and great. 210

Go! if your ancient, but ignoble blood

Has crept through scoundrels ever since the flood,[1499]

Go! and pretend your family is young;

Nor own your fathers have been fools so long.

What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards? 215

Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards.[1500]

[Sidenote: 5. Greatness.]

Look next on greatness; say where greatness lies.

"Where but among the heroes and the wise!"

Heroes are much the same, the point's agreed,

From Macedonia's madman[1501] to the Swede; 220

The whole strange purpose of their lives to find,

Or make, an enemy of all mankind![1502]

Not one looks backward, onward still he goes,[1503]

Yet ne'er looks forward further than his nose.[1504]

No less alike[1505] the politic and wise; 225

All sly slow things,[1506] with circumspective eyes:

Men in their loose unguarded hours they take,

Not that themselves are wise, but others weak.

But grant that those can conquer, these can cheat,

'Tis phrase absurd[1507] to call a villain great:[1508] 230

Who wickedly is wise, or madly brave,

Is but the more a fool, the more a knave.

Who noble ends by noble means obtains,

Or, failing, smiles in exile or in chains,

Like good Aurelius let him reign,[1509] or bleed 235

Like Socrates,[1510] that man is great indeed.

[Sidenote: 6. Fame.]