An Essay on Man 9781400880447

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A n Essay on M a n

Frontispiece to An Essay on Man from the 1745 edition, designed by Pope. © The British Library Board, C.184.d.3 frontispiece.

AN

ESSAY ON

MAN ALEX ANDER POPE Edited and w ith an introduction by

TOM JONES

Princeton Univ ersit y Press Princeton & Oxford

Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu Jacket art: Valentine Green, An Abridgment of Mr. Pope's Essay on Man, engraving, 1769, Wellcome Library, London All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pope, Alexander, 1688–1744, author. | Jones, Tom, 1975– editor. Title: An essay on man / Alexander Pope ; edited with an introduction by Tom Jones. Description: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015044289 | ISBN 9780691159812 (hardback : acid-free paper) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, English—18th century—Poetry. | Human beings—Poetry. | BISAC: POETRY / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry. | PHILOSOPHY / General. Classification: LCC PR3627.A2 J66 2016 | DDC 821/.5—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044289 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Adobe Caslon Pro and Big Caslon FB Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii

A bbr e v i at ions a n d Fr e qu e n t ly C i t e d Wor k s ix

Introduction xv

Note on the Text cxvii

A n Essay on M a n 1

P o p e ’s K n o w l e d g e o f Authors Cited 99

Bibliogr aphy 107

Index 123 v

ACK NOW LEDGMENTS

I

would like to express my gratitude to the following people and institutions: the British Library for permission to reproduce the frontispiece from the 1745 edition of the poem, and four pages from a copy of the 1736 edition of the poem annotated by Pope, © The British Library Board, C.184.d.3 frontispiece; C.122.e.31, pp. 21– 24; the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, for permission to cite Jonathan Richardson Jr.’s transcript of a manuscript of the poem (Cased + Pope. Alexander Pope. An Essay on Man. Epistles I, II, III, and 10 lines of Epistle IV. MS Copy in the hand of Jonathan Richardson, the younger, unsigned and undated); the Morgan Library & Museum for permission to cite their manuscript of the poem, MA,348; the Houghton Library, Harvard University, for permission to cite their manuscript of the poem, fms Eng 233.1; Ben Tate at Princeton University Press for his proposal that I undertake this project, and his support throughout; Simon Jarvis and Jim McLaverty for scrutinizing my early plans; Anya Clayworth for discussions of editorial policy; James Harris, Christian Maurer, and Mikko Tolonen for encouragement in Edinburgh, 2013/14; Joanna Fowler, Elaine Hobby, and Alan Ingram, the organizers of the 2013 Bill Overton memorial conference, and other colleagues encountered there, especially John Baker, Hermann Real, and Nigel Wood, for the opportunity to share ideas; Hannah Britton and Anna West, the organizers of a symposium on endings in the School of English at St Andrews, and the other participants, for making me ask where this poem ends; staff at the British Library, the Houghton Library, Harvard, the Morgan Library, New York, the National Library of Scotland, and St Andrews University Library for all their assistance; Natalie Adamson, Peter Brennan, Phil Connell, Russell Goulbourne, Neil Pattison, and Courtney Weiss Smith for reading and commenting on the introduction and text; the anonymous readers for the Press, vii

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whose responses have greatly improved my contribution to this volume; Karin Koehler for translating the text by Lessing and Mendelssohn cited in the introduction; all my colleagues in the School of English at St Andrews for maintaining a truly collective feel to our work; Gavin Alexander and Corinna Russell for hospitality and improving conversation on visits to Cambridge; Natalie Adamson for continuing to share ideas and life with me.

A Note on the Frontispiece William Warburton in his preface to the 1745 edition of the Essay, pp. v–vi, interprets the frontispiece as follows: “The Reader will excuse my adding a word concerning the Frontispiece; which, as it was designed and drawn by Mr. Pope himself, would be a kind of curiosity had not the excellence of the thought otherwise recommended it. We see it represents the Vanity of human Glory, in the false pursuits after Happiness: Where the Ridicule, in the Curtain-cobweb, the Death’s-head crown’d with laurel, and the several Inscriptions on the fastidious ruins of Rome, have all the force and beauty of one of his best wrote Satires: Nor is there less expression in the beardedPhilosopher sitting by a fountain running to waste, and blowing up bubbles with a straw, from a small portion of water taken out of it, in a dirty dish; admirably representing the vain business of SchoolPhilosophy, that, with a little artificial logic, sits inventing airy arguments in support of false science, while the human Understanding at large is suffered to lie waste and uncultivated.”

A BBR EV I ATIONS A N D F R E Q U E N T LY CITED WORKS Addison

Aurelius Bacon, Advancement Bacon, Essayes

Boethius Chudleigh

Cicero, Dream

Cicero, On Duties

Joseph Addison, Cato, in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and Other EighteenthCentury Plays, ed. by John Hampden (London: Dent, 1928; repr. 1964) Marcus Aurelius, �e Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, trans. by Meric Casaubon (London: Dent, 1906) Francis Bacon, �e Advancement of Learning, ed. by Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) Francis Bacon, �e Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. by Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985; reissued 2000) Boethius, �e Consolation of Philosophy, trans. by P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) Mary, Lady Chudleigh, �e Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh, ed. by Margaret J. M. Ezell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) Cicero, Laelius, On Friendship (Laelius de amicitia) & �e Dream of Scipio (Somnium Scipionis), ed. and trans. by J.G.F. Powell (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1990) Cicero, On Duties, trans. by Walter Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913) ix

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Cicero, On Friendship Cicero, Laelius, On Friendship (Laelius de amicitia) & �e Dream of Scipio (Somnium Scipionis), ed. and trans. by J.G.F. Powell (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1990) Corr. �e Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. by George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956) Dryden �e Works of John Dryden, ed. by Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–2000) Erasmus Desiderius Erasmus, �e Praise of Folly, ed. and trans. by Clarence H. Miller, afterword by William H. Gass, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003) FL [ . . . ], CiH [ . . . ] “A Finding List of Books Surviving from Pope’s Library with a Few That May Not Have Survived,” Appendix A in Maynard Mack, Collected in Himself: Essays Critical, Biographical, and Bibliographical on Pope and Some of His Contemporaries (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982), pp. 394–460. Foxon David Foxon, Pope and the Early EighteenthCentury Book Trade (�e Lyell Lectures, Oxford 1975–1976), rev. and ed. by James McLaverty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) HLM Houghton Library Manuscript Horace Horace, Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica, ed. by H. R. Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926; rev. 1929), and Horace, Odes and Epodes, trans. by C. E. Bennett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914; rev. 1960) Hutcheson, Essay Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, ed. by

A bbr ev i at ions

Hutcheson, Inquiry

Leibniz

Leibniz-Clarke

LGA

Lipsius

Locke Lucretius

Manilius

MLM

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Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2002) Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises, ed. by Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2004) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, �eodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, ed. by Austin Farrer, trans. by E. M. Huggard (Chicago: Open Court, 1985) Samuel Clarke, �e Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, Together with Extracts from Newton’s Principia and Opticks, ed. by H. G. Alexander (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956) Maynard Mack, �e Last and Greatest Art: Some Unpublished Poetical Manuscripts of Alexander Pope (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984) Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, trans. by John Stradling, ed. and intro. by Rudolf Kirk, notes by Clayton Morris Hall (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1939) John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) T. Lucretius Carus �e Epicurean Philosopher his Six Books De Natura Rerum Done into English Verse, with Notes, trans. by Thomas Creech (Oxford, 1682) �e Five Books of M. Manilius, Containing a System of the Ancient Astronomy and Astrology Together with the Philosophy of the Stoicks, trans. by Thomas Creech (London, 1697) Morgan Library Manuscript

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MM Montaigne

Maynard Mack Essays of Michael Seigneur de Montaigne, trans. by Charles Cotton, 3 vols. (London, 1685–86) Pope, or a note by Pope Blaise Pascal, �oughts on Religion, and Other Subjects, trans. by Basil Kennet (London, 1704) Plotinus, �e Enneads, trans. by Stephen MacKenna, ed. by John Dillon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991) Plutarch, �e Philosophie, Commonlie Called, �e Morals, trans. by Philemon Holland (London, 1603) �e Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. by H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) �e Works of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, ed. by Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) Seneca, Moral Essays, trans. by John W. Basore, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928) Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. by Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes and Characters of Books and Men, ed. by James M. Osborn, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966) �e Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. by John Butt, 11 vols. (London: Methuen, 1939–69) �e Works of Sir William Temple, 2 vols. (London, 1720)

P Pascal Plotinus Plutarch Prior

Rochester Seneca Shaftesbury

Spence

TE Temple

A bbr ev i at ions Thomson Voltaire, Letters Warburton Wollaston Wycherley

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James Thomson, �e Seasons and �e Castle of Indolence, ed. by James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, trans. by Ernest Dilworth (Indianapolis, IN: BobbsMerrill, 1961) William Warburton, A Critical and Philosophical Commentary on Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man (London, 1742) William Wollaston, �e Religion of Nature Delineated (London, 1724) �e Posthumous Works of William Wycherley Esq; In Prose and Verse (London, 1728)

INTRODUCTION

I

n four verse epistles of modest length published anonymously between February 1733 and January 1734, Alexander Pope revealed yet another aspect of his vast poetic ambition. Having already published a substantial collected poems in 1717, translated Homer, edited Shakespeare, and trumpeted the corruption of contemporary literary and public culture in his Dunciad, Pope writes a philosophical poem. He begins his poem with (nearly) the same avowed purpose as Milton in Paradise Lost, already in Pope’s time the great British religious and national epic: to vindicate (Milton says justify) the ways of God to man. But Pope does not use biblical history—the elevation of the son, the fall of angels, the creation of the world, the fall of the first people—to shape his vindication. Instead he produces a description of man in the abstract in four epistles that he says are a map to the more practically oriented and historically specific poems he was planning, poems on subjects such as the use of riches and taste. Forgoing narrative is one challenge Pope sets himself; another is the ambition of the Essay on Man to synthesize the great diversity of thinking in the allied disciplines with something to say about where humans find themselves in the universe (anthropology, cosmology, metaphysics, moral psychology, physics, theology—just to begin a list). Pope formulates concise statements on central ethical topics, moderating between antagonistic schools of thought. Further, he writes a poem that passes for orthodoxy, even piety, in the terms of eighteenth-century British state religion, while not specifying the Christian revelation in the poem. Indeed, Pope evokes and transforms sources seen as a direct threat to the religious establishment, such as Lucretius’s materialistic poem De rerum natura. Pope does all this in rhyming couplets, sacrificing none of the virtuosity he had already demonstrated in his previous original poems and translations. An Essay on Man was warmly received—in its anonymous form even by many who were fresh from ugly exchanges with Pope in the xv

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years following his Dunciad (1728–29). The Essay was imitated and echoed immediately by other poets, in essays on the universe, on the soul of man, on reason, and many other topics. The poem’s reputation was assailed on the publication, and translation into English, of two critical treatises attacking its supposed fatalism by J.-P. de Crousaz in the late 1730s. But this episode provoked a substantial defense of the poem by William Warburton, who later worked with Pope to produce a last authorized text, with extensive notes and commentary, in 1743. In the final years of Pope’s life, and after his death in 1744, translations of the poem in prose and verse, and sometimes its English original, were being read by philosophical luminaries around Europe. Voltaire called it the most beautiful didactic poem ever composed, Rousseau found in it a source of consolation, and Kant quoted it in his Universal Natural History and �eory of the Heavens. The poem was standard reading for the central philosophers of the Enlightenment, with figures such as Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, David Hume, and Adam Smith all turning to the poem to help them work through their own presentations of that contrary thing, the Enlightenment human subject: rational, yet sensual and passionate; motivated by an instinct for self-preservation, and yet ineradicably social. The poem’s success is very much a legacy of the scope it gives its readers to see the human in quite radically different ways, as the product of order and design, or the product of chance and evolution. The poem met with great, though never unmixed, success. It circulated widely among the framers of early state constitutions in America and has, in that context, been called perhaps “the most internalized work of social and political thought of the eighteenth century.” The debates that founded the individual states and their confederation often responded to Pope’s assertion that only fools would contest for forms of government.1 Politicians continue to find rhetorical uses for the poem. A search of Hansard, the record of British parliamentary speeches, finds the poem recently cited in both houses, by likely candidates (Michael Foot, the Labour leader from 1980 to 1 Eric Slauter, �e State as a Work of Art: �e Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 27–36 and quotation from p. 29.

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1983 and author of several books, including one on Swift) and less likely (Eric Pickles, communities minister in the coalition government 2010–15), and in the context of debates on establishing a social science research council (because the proper study of mankind is man), energy policy, capital gains tax, life sentences for murder, Wales, and Westminster Council. The poem has been used as a tool for thinking by philosophers and politicians from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. It has been a practical resource for understanding where humans are placed in the world, what kind of being they are, and what they should do. It has had a palpable role in shaping national and international understandings of human nature, knowledge, and obligations. Consequently it is surprising that the poem has not figured more prominently in the productive confrontation of literary and cultural studies with social theory and postwar European philosophy that has left such a strong mark on the university study of literature in the Anglophone world in the last few decades. It is particularly surprising given the close attention Pope’s poem pays to some of the main strands of thought that have emerged or are emerging in this ongoing confrontation. To take just one example, Pope is intrigued by the human-animal distinction, with all ranks in his great chain of being displaying different qualities, yet all subserving one another. His capacity for seeing things from the animal point of view, for imagining the different worlds animals inhabit, has been noted by recent readers such as Laura Brown and Judith Shklar. Pope’s poem is an extended meditation on the limits of human cognition, inasmuch as they shape our interrelation with others—other people primarily, but also other organisms or beings of all kinds. It is an attempt to show what poetry, distinct from all other literary modes, can do to make such thinking real, live, and palpable for its audience; how it can make us feel, across its lines, and across its more elaborate argumentative units, the antagonistic forces that always beset our efforts to understand the human. It is unlikely that these will ever cease to be important commitments for a philosophical literature or for poetry. Attuning ourselves to Pope’s nuance and scope allows us to see the perennial relevance of his poem. I hope in this introduction to make a contribution to that attunement.

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A Philosophical Poem An Essay on Man is a philosophical poem. Its readers are divided in various ways, admiring or denigrating its philosophy or its poetry, noting how the one supports or fails to support the other. They have often attempted to sift, to a greater or lesser degree, the poetry from the philosophy, regarding philosophy as a matter of static doctrine, poetry as uncontainable energy. Such an opposition is unnecessary. For one thing, in Pope’s time a range of literary forms were acceptable vehicles for philosophizing, including poetry.2 Further, the classical traditions on which Pope draws so strongly in his Essay combine poetic and philosophic vision: Plato is a writer of fables and a forger of striking images; Lucretius points to his own language as an example of the philosophical doctrines of Epicurus he relates; Boethius alternates prose and verse. In this section I suggest not only that we may take both Pope’s philosophy and his poetry seriously, but that his poem instantiates a poetic philosophy, one in which necessity emerges from contingency. The poem, that is, redescribes chance as direction: the particular unfolding of events through history in this way rather than any other imaginable way will be presented as the right way, which, viewed retrospectively and as the way of getting just here, it must be. This interplay of contingency and necessity experienced when the same world is seen from different perspectives forms the imaginative environment of the poem. The Latin poet Claudian, whom Pope had read, opens one of his poems with a sketch of what it feels like to experience the interplay of contingency and necessity: Oft has this Thought perplex’d my wav’ring Mind, If Heaven’s great Gods gave heed to Human-kind, Or, no high Pow’r attending Things so low, Strange Random Chance rul’d ev’ry Change below. 2 James A. Harris, “Introduction,” in �e Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, ed. by James A. Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) pp. 1–17 (pp. 8–9). For a sustained and historically broad consideration of the relationship between literary form and content in philosophy, see Jon Stewart, �e Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing: �e Perils of Conformity (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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When my Mind’s Eye did Nature’s Leagues survey, The Flux and Reflux of the bounded Sea, The just Vicissitudes of Night and Day; Amaz’d, convinc’d, I all Things understood Establish’d by the Counsel of a GOD. By him the Stars, in order, gild the Skies, Earth’s different Fruits, in diff’rent Seasons, rise. By His Command, so shines the changeful Moon With borrow’d Light, and with his own the Sun. ’Tis He, that circ’ling round the Sea did call The Shore, and in the Centre poiz’d the Ball. But, when again I cast a curious Eye, And saw Men’s Deeds in dark Confusion lye; Saw pious Men perplex’d in impious Times, While smiling Rogues long flourish’d in their Crimes, Stagger’d at once, I fault’ring Faith foregoe Forc’d and forc’d hard against my Will, to go Into their Sentiments, who boldly say, The Seeds of Things in whirling Atoms lay, Whence shuffled Forms, that to New-being start, Are all by Fortune rul’d, and none by Art. I thought with them, who or no Gods declare Or mindless, if there be, of Men they are. In a preface addressed to Pope, the anonymous translator claims this is the first time Claudian’s Against Rufinus has appeared in English. Attesting to the talents and just fame of Claudian (c. ad 370–?404), the preface flatters Pope by proxy. It refers to Rufinus, as a “Prime Minister,” and catalogs the violence and corruption of his rise to political and military power through strategy and manipulation.3 The portrait of Rufinus is clearly to be applied to Robert Walpole, first minister to George I and George II, to whom Pope attributes a pervasive corrupting influence in several poems of the 1730s. The concluding thought of the opening verse paragraph of Claudian’s poem, 3 Claudian’s Rufinus: Or, the Court-Favourite’s Overthrow, trans. by anon., 2nd ed. (London, 1730), pp. 1–2, xii, vii. See also Claudian, ed. and trans. by Maurice Platnauer, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1922), I,26–27.

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following on from the passage just quoted, is impressively severe. The doubts that made Claudian teeter between providentialism and materialism are resolved by the killing of Rufinus: that is what persuades him there must be a God after all. This poem shares the poetico-philosophical realization of the Essay on Man: people who look hard at the world often find their view of the object shifting between aspects, an aspect of order, harmony, and coherence, and an aspect of random variation, chance, and inscrutable causes. The aspects are not perfectly distinct.4 Claudian does not say that he ceases to see regularity in the ordering of the physical universe; but he thinks that regularity might have emerged by chance rather than direction. He does not doubt observable order, but notes that when he considers the sphere of human actions, and the high incidence of the problem of calamitous virtue (and its sister, the problem of prosperous vice), he takes the moral world as evidence against the benignity, even the existence, of the gods. The resolution of Claudian’s doubts is by a means (revenge killing) that might not appeal to Pope. The standard Christian approach to the problem of calamitous virtue begins with the supposition of a future state of rewards and punishments, rather than with pain meted out to one’s enemies in this world. And a standard Stoic approach to the problem notes that apparent ills cannot really be ills to the truly wise man.5 But for certain kinds of thinker, among whom I place Pope, neither an assertion that the next world will correct the injustices of this one, nor an insistence that people in this world can free themselves from suffering by detaching themselves from a dependence on external goods, will seem an adequate explanation for the fact that there is benevolent order and suffering. Plotinus, a 4 Fred Parker, Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 88, 117, describes the Essay as “Like a photographic double exposure [ . . . ] scepticism leads to, and terminates in, the intuition of a benign disposing power distinct from and beyond the scope of reason, yet with which the reasoning consciousness can associate itself.” 5 Seneca, I,61: “Injury has as its aim to visit evil upon a person. But wisdom leaves no room for evil, for the only evil it knows is baseness, which cannot enter where virtue and uprightness already abide. Consequently, if there can be no injury without evil, no evil without baseness, and if, moreover, baseness cannot reach a man already possessed by uprightness, then injury does not reach the wise man.”

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Christian Platonist writing just over a hundred years before Claudian, presents the problem of calamitous virtue as a real problem, requiring real intellectual work to explain: As for the disregard of desert—the good afflicted, the unworthy thriving—it is a sound explanation no doubt that to the good nothing is evil and to the evil nothing can be good: still the question remains, why should what essentially offends our nature fall to the good while the wicked enjoy all it demands? How can such an allotment be approved? [ . . . ] Certainly a maker must consider his work as a whole, but none the less he should see to the due ordering of all the parts, especially when these parts have Soul, that is, are Living and Reasoning Beings: the Providence must reach to all the details; its functioning must consist in neglecting no point.6 Taking the shift of aspects between providential and naturalistic views of the world, sharpened by a consideration of apparent moral injustice, as a point of departure for philosophical satire unites Pope and Claudian closely.7 That Pope offers in the Essay an explanation of the interrelation of these two aspects through a sustained examination of the workings of providence in this world is what allies him with Plotinus.

A V er se Essay The Essay is more inquisitive than expository: there is a real question to be addressed, and the philosophizing voice that produces this poem will make an inquiry into that question, rather than set out a solution already formulated. The Essay is not a work of systematic philosophy, of which the consecutively encountered branches all stem from a stable set of core doctrines. The poem is on the contrary a 6 Plotinus, III.2, 6, pp. 141–42. 7 A. D. Nuttall, Pope’s Essay on Man (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), pp. 54, 80, recognizes that there is a philosophical tension in the poem between limited human reason and the complete reason of a rational universe, and that there is a tension in humans themselves, occupying a middle position in the great chain of being that Nuttall identifies with consciousness.

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testimony to the experience of thinking and seeing in one way and then another, a testimony to the unfolding of experience and ideas, of consecutive states of belief and understanding. Pope adopts an inquisitive attitude, a style of thinking and writing that brings the feel of certain ideas in the personal experience of the author into play among more theoretical considerations. In this way Pope’s Essay is true to the history of the essay as a genre. Essays in the early eighteenth century are inquisitive, with the French model of Michel de Montaigne very much in evidence, and behind Montaigne his Latin and Greek favorites Seneca and Plutarch. These are all writers who accumulate evidence on every side of a question and engage in consecutive consideration of the attractions of now one, now another approach. For these authors, writing an essay does not oblige one to demonstrate a set of core beliefs entirely fixed before the process of writing begins; quite the opposite may be the case. There is equally a tradition of British philosophical essayism and inquiry incorporating canonical philosophers such as Bacon, Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume, who combine the inquisitive attitude I am describing with various degrees of systematization. (I will point to connections between Pope’s poem and works by these and other authors below.)8 The purpose of attitudinal writing of the sort found in these philosophical essays is not only or merely to expose truths, but to produce dispositions in a readership.9 The writing will of course have to deal in truth, but the truths it deals in will always be relational: they will be the truths of how certain kinds of creature (people) can reconcile their capacity to understand, at least in part, what is going on around them with their capacity to make choices to behave in one way or another. Joseph Spence, a friend of Pope’s who recorded his conversation, and other literary conversation of the time, says that in 1730, when the poem is being composed, “Mr Pope’s present design [is] wholly upon 8 John J. Richetti, Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 49–50, suggests parallels between the conversational openings and the associated social assumptions of Locke’s and Pope’s Essays. 9 Harry M. Solomon, �e Rape of the Text: Reading and Misreading Pope’s Essay on Man (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), notes of the poem that “we should expect the constative function of language to be ancillary to the directive function.”

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human actions, and to reform the mind.”10 Pope’s inquiry has reforming ambitions, describing actions in order to change minds. There is an important temporal quality to inquisitive or essayistic writing of the kind Pope attempts in the Essay. It was a commonplace of the poetry of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that the world changes, that therefore what was the case might not be so any longer, and so some (empirical) truths are temporally successive. Two contradictory statements can both be true of the world, in two or more of its successive states. As John Donne put it, “though some things are not together true, / As, that another is worthiest, and that you: / Yet, to say so, doth not condemne a man, / If when he spoke them, they were both true than.”11 Pope’s poem, though, is less concerned with the mutability of the world than with the mutability of human judgments. Different views of the world succeed one another in our imagination, and in our rational judgment (if these things are really distinct).12 One may be inclined to say, on encountering such inconsistent views in Pope’s poem, that he has not thought it through and shows himself more a poet than a philosopher. Or one might say that a convincing, gripping, plausible essay or inquiry has to be true to the temporality of thought, has to recognize that thought happens in particular lives. Those lives are never thought entirely through until they end, and there is no guarantee that their course will represent a continuous progress toward ever greater logical certainty about the nature of the physical and moral world. Readers might very well feel strongly the tension between Pope’s derision for the attempt to see beyond the human position in the scale of created life, in the first epistle of the poem, and his depiction (in the fourth epistle) of a blissful socially integrated universe in which recognized interdependence with others outside ourselves is parsed as love. How can one believe in Epistle I that it is “but a part we see, and not a whole” (I.60), and also in Epistle IV that humans learn “from this union of the rising Whole, / The first, 10 Spence, I,130, no. 295. 11 �e Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. by C. A. Patrides (London: Dent, 1985), p. 306, “To the Countess of Salisbury. August. 1614.,” lines 47–50. 12 Rosalie Colie, “John Locke and the Publication of the Private,” Philological Quarterly 45 (1966): 22–45 (pp. 32–33), argues that Locke took human understanding to be a process conducted in the course of a life, and so necessarily changing.

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last purpose of the human soul” (IV.337–38)? The tension is not to be resolved—it is to be recognized as one of the truths of the vision of the fourth epistle that it was arrived at by means of the first, and that the first lives on as an antagonist even as the more systematic vision is expounded. Such tensions are evident at the local as well as the general level. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” so that blessings are always in the future. “The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home, / Rests and expatiates in a life to come” (I.95–98). This may be a present tense with a future sense: the soul will rest in the next life. Or it may be a true present tense, suggesting that the soul now rests in the idea of a better future state. The ambiguity of tense suggests that people already enjoy those blessings that are possible only in the next life. The poem captures complex, shifting attitudes in its local and general organization. If Pope seems to lurch between thinking all human views of the world are provisional to thinking that humans are full and conscious agents in the providential scheme, then the antagonism between the two views should be tempered by a sense of the strong semantic connection between the provisional (the forecast) and the providential (the foreseen). The particular literary mode of Pope’s poem is well suited to expressing the shift of aspects characteristic of his philosophical attitude. The poeticalness of Pope’s text is intrinsic to its essayism. Philosophical essays and inquiries in prose have their prosody. That is true even of the mostly abstract-expository prose of John Locke, for example, whose critique of rhetoric as “perfect cheat,” a subversion of the central or paradigmatic use of language in neutral scientific description, was so influential in the eighteenth century.13 Such essays exploit shifts of attitude, turn from the anecdotal to the abstract, incorporate dialogue or reported speech, launch on encomia or rhapsodies, and so on. They may of course use some of the resources of language that are commonly called poetic: pun, irony, metaphor, the more or less organized variation of sounds and rhythms within recurring patterns of syntax or sentence structure. These features may become argumentative. An essay in verse will not be categorically distinct from prose essays on any of these counts, though it may trust more to such resources. William Warburton indeed suggests that 13 Locke, III.x.34, p. 508.

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Pope has the “Art of converting Poetical Ornaments into Philosophic Reasoning; and of improving a Simile into an Analogical Argument.”14 The lines to which Warburton refers turn not only their imagery to this end, but other resources of the rhyming couplet: On their own Axis as the Planets run, Yet make at once their circle round the Sun: So two consistent motions act the Soul; And one regards Itself, and one the Whole.

(III.313–16)

Poetic lines, like planets and souls, are subject to two (or more) consistent motions that put them in act. The first couplet cited dedicates one line each to the two planetary motions, one around an axis, the other around the sun; the first line of the second couplet introduces the analogy, the second line divides itself in two, each of its halves representing one of the consistent forces. Distribution of content across the couplets dramatizes the picture of consistent but distinct forces in operation, as do many other features of the lines (such as that between metrical stress on the even syllables and intonational stress on syllables 3, 4, 8, and 10 of line 313). A verse essay is more likely than its prose sisters to press its prosody upon its reader—its organization into lines of verse, determined by numbers of syllables and potential distributions of stress among them.15 (Even this characteristic resource of poetic language is not strictly peculiar to texts in verse: both Pope and George Berkeley, 14 Warburton, p. 137. Compare Harry M. Solomon, “Reading Philosophical Poetry: A Hermeneutics of Metaphor for Pope’s Essay on Man,” in �e Philosopher as Writer, ed. by Robert Ginsberg (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1987), pp. 122–39 (p. 138): “Pope uses metaphor to organize experience hypothetically but recognizes that he cannot ontologically warrant his construct.” And Leopold Damrosch Jr., �e Imaginative World of Alexander Pope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 163, 187: “when a poet draws upon philosophy he translates it into his own imaginative structure, in which forcible images are more important than connected arguments [ . . . ] his metaphors, many of which are highly seductive, tend to illustrate difference while claiming to prove connection.” 15 See on this subject my “Argumentative Emphases in Pope’s An Essay on Man,” in Voice and Context in Eighteenth-Century Verse: Order in Variety, ed. by Joanna Fowler and Allan Ingram (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), pp. 47–63.

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one of Pope’s philosophical friends, present segments of Shaftesbury’s writing as blank verse.)16 In addition to the temporal unfolding of argument that one might call prosody in an extended sense, the more restricted sense of prosody will muster stress around lines of verse, and indeed verse paragraphs and epistles, in such a way as to affect materially the argument of the poem. This could hardly be more evident than in the final line of Epistle I, the line perhaps most frequently presented as encapsulating the poem’s philosophy, often by those who find it blandly, unconvincingly optimistic: “One truth is clear, ‘Whatever is, is right’ ” (I.294).17 The dominant stress in the line can quite naturally be placed on its final syllable to produce an assertion of the evidence of the providential scheme in all that can be observed. Such an assertion might be thought glib. It might also be thought inconsistent with the various kinds of wrong that Pope has spent much time elaborating in the preceding epistle. If, however, one takes that preceding epistle more strongly into account when performing the line, and if one is aware of the strong sense of provisionality coloring the poet’s assertions, the antepenultimate syllable becomes an attractive place to lay the dominant stress. A performance of that kind says that if one can put reason and pride to one side, what there is, no matter how bad it appears to be, is nonetheless right. Pope says this is a clear truth; he does not see the rightness of the world as a concession made only grudgingly, as Plotinus seems to suggest when saying that “even as things are, all is well” (III.2, 17, p. 155; see notes for a longer citation). If readers like Voltaire and Rousseau tended to take Pope as saying that all is well (largely on account of the French translation of the poem), others saw this could not be the case. Lessing and Mendelssohn note the important difference between things being well and things being right, and understand that Pope can only mean the latter because the ills he has acknowledged prevent him from making an unqualified assertion of the former position.18 And this more qualified sense of the rightness 16 See Dunciad IV.488n in TE V,389–90 and George Berkeley, Berkeley’s Alciphron: English Text and Essays in Interpretation, ed. by Laurent Jaffro, Geneviève Brykman, and Claire Schwartz (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2010),V.22, pp. 163–64. 17 For a discussion of the impact typography has on reading this line, see Jones, “Argumentative Emphases,” pp. 55–56. 18 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, “Pope ein Meta-

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of what is, made possible by that alternative stressing of the line, has appealed to more recent readers. For John Sitter “what [Pope] ultimately means by ‘Whatever is, is right’ might be ‘Whatever is, IS.’ ”19 One must work through seeing the world as provisional to seeing it as providential, and that work is partly done by the archetypally poetic features of Pope’s text such as its stress. Such turning of the poetic to philosophical ends is in part a response to the pressure placed on rhetoric as a cheat and enemy of philosophy in Britain from the later seventeenth century. Pope is showing that poetry is not always philosophy’s antagonist. Pope chose to compose the Essay in verse for two reasons, the first of which he says is obvious: “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.” Any merit of the Essay lies in “steering betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite, in passing over terms utterly unintelligible, and in forming a temperate yet not inconsistent, and a short yet not imperfect system of Ethics” (“The Design”).20 The concision, the memorability, and the argumentative synthesis of the poem hang together in physiker!,” in Lessings Werke, ed. by Georg Witkowski, 7 vols. (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1911), III,295–338 (pp. 315–16). I thank Dr. Karin Koehler for providing me with a translation of this text. 19 John Sitter, “Eighteenth-Century Ecological Poetry and Ecotheology,” Religion & Literature 40:1 (Spring 2008): 11–37 (p. 29). 20 Solomon, �e Rape of the Text, p. 119, suggests Cicero as the model for academic moderation in which steering between extreme positions is not regarded as inconsistency. The earlier part (pp. 1–56) of Solomon’s book is given over to a proliferation of nontraditional contexts (chiefly textual analogues) against which to read the Essay, in order to demonstrate its resistance to being situated. David B. Morris, Alexander Pope: �e Genius of Sense (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 163, thinks that “The aphoristic style convinces us of a completeness it cannot ultimately deliver.” I am suggesting that aphoristic concision need not be opposed to openness to different positions, and steering betwixt extremes. Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Alexander Pope, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1762–82), II,120, suggests something similar: “If any beauty in this Essay be uncommonly transcendent and peculiar, it is, brevity of diction; which, in a few instances, and those pardonable, have occasioned obscurity.”

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its couplets. Its tendency to shift the mood of its address, from exposition (argument) to encouragement to adopt dispositions (instruction) is captured in the assertion of its concision and comprehensibility. Indeed, the poem in its concision tends to elide the distinction between the inclusive and exclusive senses of “or”: sometimes statements that are either arguments or instructions are both arguments and instructions—the terms are interchangeable. (There are similar ambiguities on “or” at, e.g., II.35–36 and IV.264. See notes in both places.) The poem habitually intersperses imperative verbs instructing readers to think or act in some particular way in passages of otherwise relatively dispassionate and descriptive moral psychology or epistemology. The common view that the passions are stronger motivations than cold reason, expressed over ten lines (II.67–76), becomes a command: The action of the stronger to suspend Reason still use, to Reason still attend: Attention, habit and experience gains, Each strengthens Reason, and Self-love restrains.

(II.77–80)

The dominance of the indicative mood has been such that the reader is inclined to assimilate the single imperative into the descriptive scheme, making it seem only natural that we should use our reason to counteract our passions. Pope blends argument and instruction in the poem, and conceives of his versification as one way of achieving that blend. As I have been trying to suggest, the inquisitive or essayistic attitude is one to which shifts of aspect in views of the world (physical or moral) are native. The memorably concise formulations of Pope’s couplets—in their variable stress, their argumentative development, their imagistic echoes, and their shifts of tense and mood—capture a shifting of aspects between the provisional and the providential, and, crucially, their interrelation.

E duc at ion As a Catholic, Pope was excluded from major public schools and the universities. He was educated by priests acting as tutors, then at two

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clandestine Catholic schools, at the end of which process, by around his thirteenth year, he would have been drilled in Latin and Greek, and introduced to many of the major classical poets and orators, in fragments in their original language, and in translation. From twelve to twenty Pope immersed himself in poetry, reading the major Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English authors, sometimes translating or imitating striking passages. At the same time, he read hungrily in his father’s collection of works of religious controversy.21 As a young man Pope was a precocious friend, and exchanged books, views on poetics, and critiques of works in progress with older men such as William Wycherley, William Walsh, Henry Cromwell, and William Trumbull. (Indeed Pope’s surviving correspondence to 1711–12 consists of little else.) His earlier poems demonstrate an intimate knowledge of ancient and modern poets such as Virgil and Ovid, Boileau and Tassoni. Working on the translation of Homer, published in installments from 1715, would have increased Pope’s familiarity with the classical authors (Hesiod, Herodotus, Plato, Pliny, Plutarch), commentators (Eustathius), and modern literary scholars (such as Anne Dacier) so frequently cited in notes to the translation. Modern philosophical prose (including theology and politics) was clearly an area in which Pope read, even if he did not leave any other particularly concentrated record of that reading than the Essay on Man. Authors such as Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Temple, and Tillotson feature in lists he gives of admirable English prose, as do various more literary authors from Ben Jonson to Joseph Addison. One might say he admired his friends Bolingbroke and Warburton excessively for their philosophical acumen, given their current (low) estimation as philosophers. Yet they were figures Pope thought of as metaphysicians, and Bolingbroke may have guided Pope’s reading as he was composing the Essay on Man. Pope writes on at least one occasion from Bolingbroke’s library (Corr., III,163). Given that Bolingbroke had returned from a decade in exile in France, his library is likely to have been well stocked with French authors, such as Pascal, 21 Pat Rogers, A Political Biography of Alexander Pope (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), pp. 26–27; Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), pp. 47–52, 77–78, 80–81.

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Fénelon, Nicole, Malebranche—writers with whom Pope, as a fellow Catholic, may have had a more immediate relation than some of his contemporaries had. Identifying consistent intellectual dispositions in anyone is difficult, let alone a poet to whom I have just been attributing an acute sense of the variability of human judgments. But one can see in Pope an insistence on the unity of all true religion, and a deference to the inherited form of religion; a preference for the customary over the (arrogantly) rational or innovative in politics, as in religion; a moderate skepticism with clear allegiances to urbane satirical attitudes; and, crucially, an identification of the self-interested and the sociable in human interaction. Pope is a conservative skeptic for whom custom offers one of the only available witnesses as to what God has in mind for the species in the providential scheme. The following sections will identify certain persistent themes in the Essay that express Pope’s dispositions: love (both desire for something lacked and bliss in its attainment) as a force of the universe; order as the result of love, emergent if seen from a human perspective, imposed if imagined from the divine; rising as the most fit term for the order that emerges necessarily from love; falling (out) as that concatenation of events that surpasses human knowledge and yet is improperly attributed to the divinity—an emergent disorder following from the corruption of the will. All together, these four themes suggest that social love is the mechanism by which humans rise from their fallenness to something as closely resembling order as possible.

L ov e An Essay on Man is a poem of love: love expressed in the act of creating a world; love for ourselves, in the form of our appetites; love for others, from sexual partners to children to those with whom we constitute a political body. The static, hierarchical image of the chain of being is an important image in the poem, and Epistle I makes clear the severity of the transgression of aspiring to a higher position in the chain (I.233–46). Yet III.7–8 present the chain as a “chain of Love / Combining all below and all above.” The chain understood as love unites all ranks of being in the creation, rather than dividing

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them.22 III.9–14 applies the same principle of love to atomic attraction and the animation of matter (see notes for echoes of Boethius and Chaucer/Dryden). Love of god and love of man are said to be the origin of all religious and political life (III.239–40). How should one understand this love that is at once cosmogenetic, a molecular force, and the basis of political society? Pope is explicit in aligning self-love and social love. These are not antagonistic forces in the poem but forces on a continuum. Self-love is identified most strongly with the passions (II.93), desires for real or seeming goods. Other people are one of the real or seeming goods people desire: “Each loves itself, but not itself alone, / Each sex desires alike, ’till two are one” (III.121–22). Each sex desiring alike nicely blurs the distinction in question: do they desire something that is like themselves, or do they both alike desire something outside of themselves? Is the likeness of their desire a likeness of the object of the desire to themselves, or a likeness between the objects of desire (they are alike in desiring something other than the self)? Love of children is self-love at a second remove (III.124); reflections on past obligations and calculations of one’s own future weakness tend to produce care for parents (III.143–46). Desire is, then, at the center of the religious and social order of the poem, and it was even more clearly so in earlier drafts, given the evidence of the two surviving manuscripts (the earlier Morgan Library Manuscript, the later Houghton Library Manuscript, cited here as MLM and HLM). In a note that Maynard Mack identifies as the prose beginnings of later verse (LGA 192–93), Pope presents desire as evidence for the immortality of the soul: “1 Happiness ye End of Man. God implants ye desire in all mankind, & he shows not ye End wthout ye Means, wch is Virtue 2 He implants further a desire of Immortality wch at least proves he wd have us think of & expect it, & he gives no desire appetite in vain to any Creature As God plainly gave this Hope or instinct, it is plain Man should entertain it” (LGA 22 Charles Taylor contends, in Sources of the Self: �e Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 275, that “the chain of love for Pope is rather that interconnection of mutual service which the things in this world of harmonious functions render to each other.”

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288–99). No desire is vain; desires and appetites are near synonymous. Epistle III asserts that human social organization follows from the divine command to people that they observe and imitate the social organization evident in the animal world.23 Small states grow up, and join through love or fear (III.201–2). Both manuscripts of the poem at this point contain lines that do not make it into print, and which identify want as the only basis for contention between members of any species. The deleted passage concludes that “half the cause of Contest was remov’d, / When Beauty could be kind to all who lov’d” (see notes). It is hard to parse the euphemism here, but Pope is imagining a world in which there is no dispute between males for the satisfaction of sexual desire, either because there is a sufficiently large female population to accommodate all the males, or because there are no restrictions on, or reprisals for, liberty in sexual couplings. Social harmony can sometimes seem an abstraction in the poem, but one aspect of it is our being the sufficient gratification of one another’s desires, in a sexual sense. Gratification can be called bliss. “Bliss” is one of Pope’s most frequent terms for the good any creature might experience, particularly that which is most appropriate to it (the formula “proper bliss” is found at I.282 and III.110). At IV.341–60 “bliss” is the term used for ultimate human happiness, the known pleasures for which we hope, the unknown pleasures in which we have faith, the self-instantiating pleasure of virtue, and the love of all other creatures and the creator, a love also called charity. Bliss is a pleasure, the gratification of a desire to be most fully what one is.24 Bliss is paired with blessings: hope of future bliss is a present blessing (I.93–94). (Though the ety23 Courtney Weiss Smith, Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), p. 149, suggests that the desires God has given to different creatures are a noncontingent foundation for social institutions, so that “people ought to look closely at nature as they try to realize God’s will in their institutions.” 24 Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Acts of Love and Knowledge: Pope’s Narration of Self,” in Augustan Subjects: Essays in Honor of Martin C. Battestin, ed. by Albert J. Rivero (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), pp. 176–91 (p. 183): “the word ‘bliss’ and its cognates rings through the epistle [IV], alluding to the magnitude of God’s rewards and to the fact that human beings can attain them.”

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mologies of “bliss” and “bless” are distinct, they become confused in English from the sixteenth century, and it seems likely that Pope associated them semantically.) Bliss is breathed through all ranks of people as “One common blessing, as one common soul” (IV.57–62). Being in the world as one should be is presented as a pleasure. Pope explains the difference between human and divine love as a contrast of movements from individual to whole or from whole to individual. The outward movement of human love is compared to the ripples caused by a pebble dropped in a lake: “Wide and more wide, th’o’erflowings of the mind / Take ev’ry creature in, of ev’ry kind;  / Earth smiles around, with boundless bounty blest,  / And Heav’n beholds its image in his breast” (IV.369–72). In the manuscript versions of these lines “Heav’n pleas’d beholds its Image in his Breast” (LGA 282–83, 396–97). In the printed text the person who loves from individual to whole remains an image of heaven, and is seen to be so; but the pleasure heaven takes in seeing its own image is erased. The suggestion that God’s love is comparable to human desire may have been unorthodox: desire results from lack, but lack is imperfection and therefore incompatible with God. Augustine, for example, says that God loves humans, but compares the relationship to that between light and the objects upon which it shines—light does not need those objects to be light.25 But one can perhaps see in the manuscript line a trace of Pope’s thinking of desire as a fundamental force in the universe, a force that unites God and people, a force that is not qualitatively distinct whether directed toward ourselves or toward others.26 25 Saint Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. and ed. by R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 24. 26 David B. Morris, “Pope and the Arts of Pleasure,” in �e Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays, ed. by G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 95–117 (pp. 107–12), describes Pope’s “double perspective” on pleasure, in which “pleasure is the energy (rational as well as passionate) which drives us irresistibly towards virtue or towards vice,” and yet in which there is “a blankness or emptiness inherent in pleasure, undermining every enjoyment.” Nuttall, Pope’s Essay on Man, p. 165, also notices an oscillation between perspectives in which bliss is real and in which it is to be seen through. To my mind, bliss and love sound out more than blankness in the Essay.

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Order I have already cited Plotinus as a philosopher for whom providence is a real problem. His view of love as a recognition of kinship with what is other, better, and more orderly than ourselves may also be related to Pope: “It is sound, I think, to find the primal source of Love in a tendency of the Soul towards pure beauty, in a recognition, in a kinship, in an unreasoned consciousness of friendly relation. [ . . . ] Nature produces by looking to the Good, for it looks towards Order” (III.5, 1, p. 175). Love acknowledges the decreasing perfection of each position in the chain of created beings, but only as an aspect of the fullness of the creative imagination of the principle behind the universe: “the Reason-Principle would not make all divine; it makes Gods but also celestial spirits, the intermediate order, then men, then the animals; all is graded succession, and this in no spirit of grudging but in the expression of a Reason teeming with intellectual variety” (III.2, 11, p. 147). Order is also difference and inequality for Plotinus: “inequality is inevitable by the nature of things: [ . . . ] in all things, there is implied variety of things; where there is variety and not identity there must be primals, secondaries, tertiaries, and every grade downward” (III.2, 3, p. 159). Pope also happily asserts the necessity of inequality: ‘Order is Heav’n’s first law; and this confest, / Some are, and must be, greater than the rest” (IV.49–50). He goes on to claim that the hope and fear that accompany poverty and wealth, respectively, serve to equalize the two conditions. Happiness is equal, and realized through the mutual satisfaction of desires (IV.49–56). Although I shall suggest below that Pope’s defense of inequality draws on traditions of thought that stress the charity and sociability of embracing relative human imperfection, it is one of the moments in the poem that has attracted strong criticism. It is a moment at which the argumentative energy of the poem might lapse. Pope does not work for the assumption he forces on his readers—that order must be hierarchical. The following claim, that hope and fear render material inequality affectively equal, was questioned by Samuel Johnson, reviewing a publication very deeply indebted to the Essay:

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That hope and fear are inseparably or very frequently connected with poverty, and riches, my surveys of life have not informed me. The milder degrees of poverty are sometimes supported by hope, but the more severe often sink down in motionless despondence. Life must be seen before it can be known. This author and Pope perhaps never saw the miseries which they imagine thus easy to be borne.27 Pope explains away material suffering; his position even seems to suggest that higher beings enjoy and benefit from the suffering of humans. (Johnson does not press the point as far as he might: Pope’s text suggests that the enjoyment higher beings take is that of consumption, as I show below.) This kind of thinking, Johnson says, is “better adapted to delight the fancy than convince the reason.”28 The Johnsonian tradition of criticizing Pope’s avowed and unavowed ideological commitments continues, and Laura Brown’s short book on Pope of 1985 remains one of its most powerful documents. Brown declares that she wants to “define the strong poles of the poem,” not “reconcile contradiction.” For Brown, Pope’s interest in submission within a natural hierarchy is an apology for imperialism. She suggests that Pope’s depiction of the poor Indian (I.99–108), who sees the afterlife as a geographical zone in the physical world free from the rapine of Christians, is merely an occasion on which “the poem’s imagery accidentally exposed a threat for which the notion of a beneficent natural order—even if it operates on a general scale and in the long run—cannot account.”29 For both Johnson and Brown, Pope’s poeticality, his imagery, gives away his tendency to mask and apologize for the violence in systems of subordination. Johnson and Brown are obviously partly right about the poem: it excuses inequality in ways that are repulsive now, and that 260 years 27 Samuel Johnson, “Review of Soame Jenyns’ A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil. 1757,” in A Commentary on Mr. Pope’s Principles of Morality, Or Essay on Man, ed. by O. M. Brack Jr., The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 17 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 387–432 (pp. 406–7). 28 Ibid., pp. 419, 410. 29 Laura Brown, Alexander Pope (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 82, 85–86, 73.

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ago offended Johnson’s understanding of “the maxims of a commercial nation, which always suppose and promote a rotation of property, and offer every individual a chance of mending his condition by his diligence.”30 There may be occasions on which we can defend Pope. He was alive to the injustices and contradictions his society, and his active role in it (as an investor in South Sea stock, for example), produced.31 His depiction of the poor Indian cited above was, as I show in notes to the text, both longer and more biting in its critique of Christian imperialism in manuscript drafts than in the published text. It is not an image that accidentally impinges upon the text, but one that was toned down for print publication. Further, for much of the poem Pope is at least working for his view of order emerging from love, whether or not it is ultimately convincing. These factors might persuade readers to generosity in reconstructing Pope’s arguments. But the tradition of reading that doubts the basis on which Pope apologizes for inequality shows how fissures and contradictions in his assertions and images can sometimes open up. Pope’s justification of inequality has a classical and Christian heritage. Jonathan Richardson Jr., the son of Pope’s friend the painter and critic Jonathan Sr., recorded variants in the printed and manuscript texts of Pope’s poems, having been supplied by Pope with the necessary materials.32 When he transcribed MLM for Pope, he added a few pages of notes under the heading “Maxim order belonging to Essay on Man.”33 The first five maxims, with some preliminary notes, are as follows: 30 Johnson, “Review of Soame Jenyns,” p. 410. 31 John Richardson, “Alexander Pope’s Windsor Forest: Its Context and Attitudes towards Slavery,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35 (2001): 1–17. 32 LGA 194–95. See also Corr., IV,78, Pope to Jonathan Richardson, 17 June 1737, and IV,374, Pope to Jonathan Richardson, 1 December 1741. 33 Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Cased + Pope. Alexander Pope. An Essay on Man. Epistles I, II, III, and 10 lines of Epistle IV. MS Copy in the hand of Jonathan Richardson, the younger, unsigned and undated, f. 2r–v; reproducing the same material MM says the maxims are found on f. 2r, with the notes on f. 2v. When I consulted the papers in November 2013, the notes were found on the recto, the maxims on the verso. I preserve the lineation of the MS in the citation.

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1[...] ORDER in Nature or ye Universe consists in a continual Opposition of Extreams kept in due Bounds “ORDER is Heav’n’s first Law —— IV 47. from whence our Happiness. “But Mutual Wants this Happiness increase, “All Natures Diffe’rence keeps all Nature’s Peace. IV.53.^ cont.1:161. The same is in Man “Two Principles in Human Nature reign, “Self Love to urge, & Reason to restrain. II.43. &c. “The rising Tempest puts in act ye Soul, “Parts it may ravage, but preserves ye Whole. II. 95 &c. Corolary to 1. As this ORDER is makes the Happiness of the Whole, (which Happiness is its Essense, & Sole End!) so, the Nnearer Every Individual approach ’es, in Himself, to ORDER, that is to ^ TEMPERANCE, + not. whose other name is VIRTVE; by just so much the nearer He approaches to Happiness. + which is suffering some Ill for ye Good of the Whole, as Infinite Wisdom hath done in ye Universe Maxim.1. ORDER I.163.IV.47. That ORDER requires all Degrees of Single Partial Imperfection [supposing allways preponderating predominating Good] to compose a Perfect Whole. 2. That then “,There must be somewhere such a Rank as Man”. I.48. 3 That to compose that Rank the Individuals must be as they are

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4. That then a Borgia or a Cataline are not Obnoxious to Pu: :nishment because it was their Lot to be such, & not a Cato or a Socrates. 5 that then the Imputation on Providence of an unjust Dis: :tribution of Goods & Ills, to Ill & Good Men ceases. These notes identify the moral quality of temperance with undergoing some imperfection in this world, as all animals, more or less imperfect, do, and indeed as God did through incarnation as Christ and through Christ’s suffering. In these notes, the suffering implied by imperfection is an occasion for the practice of virtue and love (as it is for many philosophers from Seneca to Leibniz), and the partwhole dynamic of the Essay contributes to an explicitly Christian vision. The Plotinian universe of relative imperfection and love is not unlike that of Empedocles, the pre-Socratic philosopher-poet of Agrigentum in Sicily, who sees the universe as an attraction and repulsion of the four elements, which seen from one aspect is a process of continual change, and from another perfect constancy: For these very things are, and running through each other they become men and the tribes of other beasts, at one time coming together by love into one cosmos, and at another time again all being borne apart separately by the hostility of strife, until by growing together as one they are totally subordinated. Thus insofar as they learned to grow as one from many, and finish up as many, as the one again grows apart, in this respect they come to be and have no constant life, but insofar as they never cease from constantly interchanging, in this respect they are always unchanged in a cycle.34 34 �e Poem of Empedocles, ed. and trans. by Brad Inwood, Phoenix: Journal of the Classical Association of Canada, Phoenix Presocratics, ed. by David Gallop and T. M. Robinson, Supplementary Volume 29, Phoenix Presocratics Volume 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p. 221, fragment 28/26. The text of Empedocles’s poem (or poems) survives only in fragments quoted by other authors. This fragment is found in Simplicius’s commentary on Aristotle’s Physics. A foot-

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But such a world is not quite the world of modern subjectivity, realized in quotidian activities like work and love (for one’s family, rather than as a mystical principle of the creation) of which Charles Taylor takes Pope’s poem to be an early document. Taylor suggests that eighteenth-century thought was to “transform the understanding of the cosmos from an order of signs or Forms, whose unity lies in their relation to a meaningful whole, into an order of things producing reciprocal effects in each other, whose unity in God’s plan must be that of interlocking purposes.” Taylor sees a progression to a deist picture “of the universe as a vast interlocking order of beings, mutually subserving each other’s flourishing, for whose design the architect of nature deserves our praise and thanks and admiration.” This view is explicitly contrasted with a Plotinian view of the universe as ordered inequality, preserved and reinvigorated by Cambridge Platonists (such as Ralph Cudworth, one of whose books Pope owned). Taylor suggests that this notion of the world as interlocking and mutually servicing needs replaces the idea of the universe as the expression of a creating principle: “This new order of interlocking natures arises to take the place of an order predicated on an ontic logos.”35 But attending to love in Pope’s poem, and to the resources on which Pope may have drawn to form his view of love, closes the gap between the mystical unity of the hierarchical universe and the interlocking needs of various orders of imperfect creatures. Pope suggests that to see ourselves as creatures of love, with mutually interlocking needs, is to comprehend order, as far as we are able. The two aspects are held together in the poem. What does the interlocking of these two views of order tell us about the moment of the poem, its place in the history of ideas? Texts don’t belong to one moment alone. The very idea of a moment in the history of ideas is confounding, as the articulation of thought necessarily draws on previous articulations of previous thoughts, and quite often thoughts at odds with an overt argument or a latent note to Homer suggests that Pope had a picture of Empedocles’s poem(s) that squares with this passage, Iliad, XVIII.537n, TE VIII,348: “Empedocles seems to have taken from Homer his Assertion, that all Things had their Original from Strife and Friendship.” 35 Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 233, 244, 276.

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tendency of a text. Texts are composed, published, revised, and received through time, and not at one moment. An Essay on Man is exemplary in this respect. It is not possible precisely to say what moment the text belongs to, with drafting beginning in 1729 and continual revision up to a final authorial edition in 1743. When considering the sources available to Pope, or his political circumstances, we must take this chronological scope into account. Further, our sense of a text’s moment may shift and change. Looking at the text’s sources and its reception, its verbal details and its larger argumentative sweep, demonstrates the interdependence of one perspective on another—the text’s prehistory and its afterlife, its minute details and its broad strokes, are mutually determining. The traditions in which we place the text begin before it and continue after it, and our readings of local verbal details are in a relation of mutual dependence with our sense of the broader discursive universe in which the poem is found. In composition, revision, publication, and reception, the poem has a complex temporality, at any one point of which its form and argument are emergent rather than determined. It is itself a series of judgments (Pope’s and its readers’) unfolding in time. Taylor’s reading of the poem is a case in point: the modern view of natural order—as the (instituted or emergent) interdependency of our desires—is present at the same time as a view of order as ranks of beings subservient to one another. The position of animals with respect to humans, specifically as food, is one area in which a tension between different tendencies in the poem, and therefore traditions in which it might be said to participate, manifests. A creative principle responsible for a static rank ordering of beings is run together with a model of the interrelation of human and animal needs: Nothing is foreign: Parts relate to whole; One all-extending, all-preserving Soul Connects each being, greatest with the least; Made Beast in aid of Man, and Man of Beast; All serv’d, all serving! nothing stands alone; The chain holds on, and where it ends, unknown.

(III.21–26)

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The emphasis of the poem, however, seems largely to fall on mutual service, rather than total subservience. For example, Pope seems to advocate vegetarianism: III.147–68 describes early social life as a union between people and animals as well as between people; animal and then human sacrifice is presented as revolting at III.263–66. Judith Shklar suggests that Pope presents a view of human-animal interactions “from the animals’ vantage point, which is, to say the least, not reassuring. It presents us with a vision of viciousness within nature and not merely the melancholy cycle of birth and destruction of nature which Lucretius sang. It is the victims’ vision.” She finds Pope’s horror at human treatment of animals so extreme that “it can only put God’s arrangement in doubt.” Shklar sees the poem as a call to greater sensitivity to human-animal interdependence, with the idea of the great chain relegated to the level of an aesthetic ideal, or mere image for conceiving the creation, not an adequate description of it.36 Advocacy of vegetarianism would align Pope with some precedents for his poetico-philosophical inquiry into the nature of things: Pythagoras’s views (as set out in the fifteenth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and those of Empedocles (pp. 259–61, fragments 126/136 and 128/137) both suggest that the transmigration of souls makes eating meat criminal.37 These tones may indeed dominate the poem, as Shklar suggests, but they cannot remove some other suggestions that creatures in the chain are indeed utterly subservient to one another. 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: 36 Judith N. Shklar, “Poetry and the Political Imagination in Pope’s An Essay on Man,” in Political �ought and Political �inkers, ed. by Stanley Hoffmann, foreword by George Kateb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 193–205 (pp. 197, 200–201). 37 Michael Srigley, �e Mighty Maze: A Study of Pope’s An Essay on Man, Acta Universitatis Uppsaliensis: Studia Anglisticana Upsaliensia, ed. by Gunnar Sorelius, Rolf Lundén, and Mats Rydén, 87 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiskell, 1994), pp. 98– 134, contends that metempsychosis is the mechanism by which spirits are refined and by which good is extracted from ill in the poem’s theodicy.

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All feed on one vain Patron, and enjoy Th’extensive blessing of his luxury. That very life his learned hunger craves, He saves from famine, from the savage saves; Nay, feasts the animal he dooms his feast, And, ’till he ends the being, makes it blest; Which sees no more the stroke, or feels the pain, Than favour’d Man by touch etherial slain. The creature had his feast of life before; Thou too must perish, when thy feast is o’er!

(III.57–70)

Here Pope engages in a satirical reversal of positions, perhaps intended as a witty contrast rather than a statement of fact: animals kept for food in fact feed on the person who keeps them. The unnerving aspect of this passage, though, is the comparison between people keeping animals and God managing the lives of people: just as animals will be fed by people, then, unaware of their imminent death, be slaughtered for the table of their keepers, so, Pope says, people will be brought to their end when God judges they have feasted enough (Pope’s own note here suggests that the ancients believed death by lightning a mark of divine favor). The analogy suggests that moment is when God judges people to be sufficiently fattened. Beyond these verse paragraphs of the third epistle, there is little suggestion that man is like the pampered goose of III.45–46, deluded that the universe seems to be created for his use alone, when he is in fact being raised only to be consumed. But that picture, of divine providence as livestock management, is not entirely alien to the poem. And Plotinus suggests that such a view is compatible with providentialism: “This devouring of Kind by Kind is necessary as the means to the transmutation of living things which could not keep form for ever even though no other killed them: what grievance is it that when they must go their dispatch is so planned as to be serviceable to others?” (III.2, 15, p. 150). But the idea of human deaths being serviceable to other higher beings again hints at the imperfection of God, who should need no service. The Essay reminds its readers that mutual subservience is also mutual consumption. Pope may mask the reality that modern habits of consumption lead to the early death of

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people working in the supply chain, but despite that difference this aspect of the Essay curiously resembles Jonathan Swift’s ironic advice in A Modest Proposal that eating babies could solve simultaneous crises of overpopulation and hunger. James McLaverty has noted that order appears under different aspects in Pope’s poem: The poem is indeed a vision of order, but Pope’s vision differs from that of [Walter] Harte and others by seeing nature as power rather than primarily as structure. The problem for man is that although he has intuitions of order as structure, his experience is of order as power. [ . . . ] When the universal order does not express itself as conflict, it expresses itself as a comprehensive vitality rather than as a structure.38 This experience of two aspects to the divine dispensation provides the subject of the last book of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, a dialogue between the imprisoned author and a personification of Philosophy, from around ad 524, a text that bears strong marks of Plotinus’s thinking, and of which Pope translated the metrical section of the ninth chapter of the third book. A key distinction between providence and fate is established toward the end of book IV: “when this arrangement of the temporal order is a unity within the foresight of the divine mind, it is Providence, whereas when that unity is separated and unfolded at various times, it is called Fate.”39 People experience things that seem to be allotted to them with no or with no good cause, time bringing unpredictable things to pass. But there is unity behind this disunity, unity in God’s perception. Boethius, or rather Philosophy speaking through Boethius, notes that whether an event is brought about by an act of free will or by neces38 James McLaverty, Pope, Print, and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 135–36. Katherine M. Quinsey, “Dualities of the Divine in Pope’s Essay on Man and the Dunciad,” in Religion in the Age of Reason: A Transatlantic Study of the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. by Kathryn Duncan (New York: AMS Press, 2009), pp. 135–57 (pp. 147–48), notes that two nearly adjacent passages of the poem (I.151–58 and I.269–80) shift from a view of God as the pinnacle of a hierarchy to a view of God as immanent. 39 Boethius, IV.vi, p. 88.

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sity is a matter of judgment. Judgments always belong to particular minds. Different minds are differently endowed, and will arrive at more or less accurate judgments of the same object. God’s foreknowledge of all events is a more accurate (indeed the most perfectly accurate) judgment of the likelihood of their coming to pass, but, as we would not say of our vision that it caused events, so we should not say of God’s foreknowledge that it caused, for example, original sin (V.iv, p. 107; V.vi, pp. 112–13). Boethius is concerned with the ordering of events and their causes. Pope’s order is frequently expressed with relation to beings. In the “Argument” to Epistle I, order relates to place and rank, gradation and subordination of created beings and systems. At I.130 order is the hierarchical order of humans and angels, which it is sin to wish to invert. At I.171, passions in human emotional life are said to be consistent with the general order, as part of the strife in which the universe subsists. At I.257 the order is dread and again refers to the hierarchy of creatures and systems. At I.281 order is not to be called imperfection on account of people experiencing some subordination. In the “Argument” to Epistle III orders of men are distinguished by possessing different passions and imperfections. At III.111–14 order is the linking of animals and people through mutual wants. At III.296 “Order, Union, full Consent of things” emerge from jarring individual interests in the state. In the “Argument” to Epistle IV order is identified with inequality, as it is also at IV.49–50, and happiness “consists in a conformity to the Order of Providence.” On this showing, order understood as structure (political and politico-theological structure) is perfectly perceptible in the poem, and only occasionally undergone as the flux of human passions and other accidents, resolved by the mysterious goodness of providence. But, particularly in the last instance, Pope’s talk of order beyond the human experience of flux raises the question of how one can conform to a providence that operates beyond the comprehension of one’s species, how one can conform to an unknown and, in its entirety at least, unknowable regime. (See further discussion of related points below in the treatment of sources for Epistles I and II.) If all order is from love (the gratification of desire through others more or less like ourselves), the difference between order as structure and as power is not great.

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R i s i n g a n d Fa l l i n g There are terms other than order that might give a stronger sense of the emergent aspect of providence, its harmony arising from the various, chaotic impulses of the created world. Perhaps such emergence makes order, rather than merely expressing an eternally established order from a temporally limited point of view? When Thomas Creech in 1682 translates On the Nature of �ings by Lucretius (99–55 bc), it is immediately clear that things rise, that their nature is historical: I treat of things abstruse, the Deity, The vast and steddy motions of the Sky; The rise of Things, how curious Nature joyns The various Seed, and in one Mass combines The jarring Principles[.]40 Lucretius’s universe is one in which there are only seeds (atoms) and void (vacuum): it is an entirely material universe that begins with atoms falling and by chance swerving in their course, combining and recombining until there is life, and life as complex as that of the human world, including its moral and affective components. His philosophy is based on that of Epicurus and has been regarded as a resource for naturalistic thinking in the Enlightenment—thinking, that is, which recognizes the capacity of the observable world to exhibit its own order, particularly varieties of order that express themselves over time.41 Lucretius’s term primordium may not quite evoke the historical character of the rise of things in Creech. But Pope’s poem certainly echoes Creech’s rendering of the rise of things.42 Pope’s rising may, admittedly, evoke the ascending survey of the var40 Lucretius, p. 3. The formula “rise of things” occurs also at pp. 29, 141, and 150. For a Latin text, see Lucretius, On the Nature of �ings, trans. by W.H.D. Rouse, rev. by Martin F. Smith, 2nd ed. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1982; repr. 1992). 41 See Neven Leddy and Avi S. Lifschitz, “Epicurus in the Enlightenment: An Introduction,” in Epicurus in the Enlightenment, ed. by Neven Leddy and Avi S. Lifschitz, SVEC, ed. by Jonathan Mallinson, 2009:12 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009), pp. 1–11. 42 Charles M. Beaumont, “The Rising and Falling Metaphor in Pope’s Essay on

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ious static ranks of creation, as at I.46, where it must be the case that “all that rises, rise in due degree.” But there are more Lucretian uses also, as when forms rise from and return to the sea of matter (III.19– 20), when new needs, helps, and habits rise in the early social life of humankind (III.137). Most significantly, perhaps, readers are invited to see man “from Nature rising slow to Art” (III.169), demonstrating the historical acquisition of natural characteristics. And as the poem comes to a close, the union of all creatures in mutual dependency and love is the “union of a rising Whole” (IV.337), and the human capacity for love must “rise from Individual to the Whole” (IV.362). The acquisition of a nature most fitting humanity is a historical process that can be described as a rising (rather than being, say, an ordination).43 God is not excluded from that process, but the rise of things is a matter of their own inherent generative capacity. Falling in the Essay is rarely just downward motion as a result of gravity. There are references to the fall of the angels (I.127), and the basic metaphoric sense of falling as dying (as of the sparrow at I.88). But the term is more likely to refer to the coming about of something by chance, the coming about of events that one does not want (for good or bad reasons) to ascribe to providence. Man is “Created half to rise, and half to fall” (II.15). People fall into wrong notions of virtue and vice (II.211) or fall short of reason (III.47) or fall to extremes of doubt or certainty (IV.25). Nature lets ill fall (IV.115). Blessings fall to particular individuals (I.276). Virtue is the point where no fall to ill is known (IV.312). One can learn to fall with dignity (IV.378). Just as the rise of things suggests a historical or evolutionary force operating to one side of providence, so too does falling: there are certain things that just fall out in one way or another, without any particular providential reason. The most theologically problematic instance of Man,” Style 1 (1967): 121–30, reads the metaphor in relation to pride and folly, rather than in the ontological sense suggested here. 43 Smith, Empiricist Devotions, p. 171, places Pope among writers who maintained that “the consenting subject exists in vital relationship with nature. The heroes of their origin stories were not autonomous subjects who mastered nature, who were eager to construct institutions based solely on their ideas. Instead, their stories of social contract featured people heeding prompts in their own bodies and following hints in particular things as they attempt to proximate a divinely ordained, naturally manifest order.”

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falling is that of nature letting physical or moral ill fall, a possibility that can hardly escape the charge of separating out the operations of nature from providence. The poem is one of shifting aspects, between hierarchy and mutual independence, between rising and falling, between a providentially organized and a merely provisional world. The unification of these shifting aspects in our reading of the poem is its artistic and philosophical achievement.

Composition An Essay on Man was published anonymously as four separate verse epistles, addressed “to a friend,” on 20 February, 29 March, and 8 May 1733 and 24 January 1734. The first collected edition, published on 20 April 1734, was entitled An Essay on Man, Being the First Book of Ethic Epistles. To Henry St. John, L. Bolingbroke.44 The poem was first published under Pope’s name in the second volume of his Works of 1735. The story of the poem’s composition, however, begins at least as early as 1729. On 19 November 1729 Bolingbroke wrote to Swift, suggesting that Swift bid Pope talk to him of the work he is about and which will express a talent Bolingbroke thinks “is eminently and peculiarly his, above all the Writers I know living or dead; I do not except Horace” (Corr., III,72). (That Pope and Bolingbroke were at work on parallel metaphysical projects, and that Bolingbroke may have had a profound influence on the argument of the Essay, will be discussed below.) On 28 November Pope writes to Swift acknowledging that he is working on a “system of Ethics in the Horatian way” (Corr., III,81). Swift writes to Pope on 26 February 1730, “I hope your Ethick System is towards the umbilicum,” that is, near completion. Spence records “Colonel” Hay reporting in early 1730 that Pope was “now employed in a large design for a moral poem,” and in May 1730 that “[Mr. Pope has a] new hypothesis, that a prevailing passion in the mind is brought with it into the world, and continues till death.”45 In the same month Spence notes that “Mr. Pope has very 44 See D. F. Foxon, English Verse 1701–1750: A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 45 Spence, I,129, no. 293; I,130, no. 296.

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large prose collections on the happiness of contentment” (I,138, no. 310). (Pope’s manner of composing the poem is well attested by his correspondence and the two surviving manuscripts: he had a collection of prose fragments on the themes of the Essay that he worked into verse in more or less finished drafts, neatly copied draft material in the center of the page having layers of correction and new material added.) So by May 1730 Pope had strong ideas of the contents of Epistles II and IV of the Essay, the epistles in which the ruling passion and happiness are discussed. In January 1730/31, Bolingbroke writes to Swift that Pope is in his library “and writes to the world” (Corr., III,163). In a letter of 23 November 1731, Francis Atterbury asks Pope if he is “intent upon” his “moral plan” as he was sixteen months previously (Corr., III,247), suggesting a memorable period of activity around July 1730. The period November 1729 to July 1731 seems to have brought the first three epistles to a publishable state. Pope writes to Hugh Bethel on 28 July 1731: “I have just finished an Epistle in Verse, upon the Nature & Extent of Good nature & Social affection; & am going upon another whose subject is, The True Happiness of Man, in which I shall prove the Best Men the happiest, & consequently you should pull off your hat to me, for painting You as the happiest man in the Universe” (Corr., III,209). That is, Pope has finished Epistle III and is at work on Epistle IV. Bolingbroke writes to Swift on 2 August 1731 again noting that Epistles I–III are complete and that Pope is at work on Epistle IV. He is also clear that Epistle IV will reconcile calamitous virtue and providence: the first Epistle which considers man, and the Habitation, of man, relatively to the whole system of universal Being, the second which considers Him in his own Habitation, in Himself, & relatively to his particular system, & the third which shews how an universal cause works to one end, but works by various laws, how Man, & Beast, & vegetable are linked in a mutual Dependancy, parts necessary to each other & necessary to the whole, how human societys were formed, from what spring true Religion and true Policy are derived, how God has made our greatest inter-

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est & and our plainest Duty indivisibly the same, these three Epistles I say are finished. the fourth he is now intent upon. ’tis a noble subject. He pleads the cause of God, I use Seneca’s Expression, against that famous charge which atheists in all ages have brought, the supposed unequal Dispensations of Providence, a charge which I cannot heartily forgive you Divines for admitting. [Bolingbroke then claims to prefer the defense of God’s justice in this world to the argument for a future state based on present injustice.] the Epistles I have mentioned will compose a first Book. the plan of the Second is settled. you will not understand by what I have said that Pope will go so deep into the argument, or carry it so far, as I have hinted. (Corr., III,213–14) In early March 1732 Pope refers to “the great heap of fragments and hints before me, for my large and almost boundless work,” and sends to Fortescue, his addressee, “the third of the first part, relating to society and government” (Corr., III,271). The poem was perhaps substantially complete by late 1732. In a letter of October 1732 to Jonathan Richardson, Pope identifies a line of the poem from Epistle IV on Bolingbroke (“The sons shall blush their fathers were his foes” IV.388) as something Pope has “already said in the Essay to which you are so partial” (Corr., III,326). It has been suggested that the death of Pope’s mother on 7 June 1733 is a reason for the delay of the publication of Epistle IV, to which Pope writes to Fortescue on 13 November 1733 the “last hand” is being put (Corr., III,395). Its eventual publication nicely coincided with the last installment of Bolingbroke’s Dissertation on Parties, published serially in �e Craftsman, a coincidence that may have been planned, and which may therefore attest to the poem’s place in attempting to rally a unified opposition to the prime minister, Walpole.46 Various aspects of the conversation and correspondence above make it clear that An Essay on Man was not conceived in itself as completing the set of ethic epistles, the ambitious plan of writing Pope set for himself in the late 1720s. The scheme of the ethic epistles varied over time. In late November 1730 Spence records that 46 Mack, Pope: A Life, pp. 544–46, 601–2. See also P. J. Connell, Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 225–27.

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tom jones Mr. Pope’s poem grows on his hands. The first four or five epistles will be on the general principles, or of ‘The Nature of Man’, and the rest will be on moderation, or ‘The Use of Things’. In the latter part, each class may take up three epistles: one, for instance, against avarice, another against prodigality, and the third on the moderate use of riches; and so of the rest. These two lines contain the main design that runs through the whole: Laugh where we must, be candid where we can; But vindicate the ways of God to Man.

(I,131, no. 299)

What is now An Essay on Man was, in every collected edition of the four epistles published in Pope’s lifetime, identified as the first book of a larger, systematic moral or ethical scheme, the ethic epistles. A 1734 quarto edition of the poem, now known in only one copy, provides an index to the ethic epistles giving a sense of how extensive the scheme for the second book was: The SECOND BOOK. Of the Use of Things. Of the Limits of Human Reason. —Of the Use of Learning. —Of the Use of Wit. Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men. Of the particular Characters of Women. Of the Principles and Use of Civil and Ecclesiastical Polity. —Of the Use of Education. A View of the Equality of Happiness in the several Conditions of Men. —Of the Use of Riches, &c.47 47 Miriam Leranbaum, Alexander Pope’s ‘Opus Magnum’, 1729–1744 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 28 and pp. 27–29 for discussion of the index.

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Of these once-considered poems, those that exist in something like the shape suggested by this index are the poems treating the knowledge and characters of men, the characters of women, and the use of riches. These are the subjects of the four epistles (to Cobham, to a Lady, to Bathurst, and to Burlington—both of these last two poems are on the use of riches) that make up the Epistles to Several Persons. These poems were published as book II of the ethic epistles in the second volume of collected editions of Pope’s works from 1735 onward. Spence records that Pope has restricted the plan for the ethic epistles by 1734 (I,132, no. 300), and on 19 December of that year Pope writes to Swift saying: I am almost at the end of my Morals, as I’ve been, long ago, of my Wit; my system is a short one, and my circle narrow. Imagination has no limits, and that is a sphere in which you may move on to eternity; but where one is confined to Truth (or to speak more like a human creature, to the appearances of Truth) we soon find the shortness of our Tether. Indeed by the help of a metaphysical chain of idæas, one may extend the circulation, go round and round for ever, without making any progress beyond the point to which Providence has pinn’d us: But this does not satisfy me, who would rather say a little to no purpose, than a great deal. (Corr., III,445) But that the project would not die in Pope’s imagination quite so easily is evidenced by a further letter to Swift, 25 March 1736, in which Pope talks of a scheme long “concerted” that would include a verse epistle addressed to Swift: The subject is large, and will divide into four Epistles, which naturally follow the Essay on Man, viz. 1. Of the Extent and Limits of Human Reason, and Science, 2. A view of the useful and therefore attainable, and of the un-useful and therefore unattainable, Arts. 3. Of the nature, ends, application, and the use of different Capacities. 4. Of the use of Learning, of the Science of the World, and of Wit. It will conclude with a Satire against the

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tom jones misapplication of all these, exemplify’d by pictures, characters, and examples. But alas! the task is great, and non sum qualis eram! My understanding indeed, such as it is, is extended rather than diminish’d: I see things more in the whole, more consistent, and more clearly deduced from, and related to, each other. But what I gain on the side of philosophy, I lose on the side of poetry: the flowers are gone, when the fruits begin to ripen, and the fruits perhaps will never ripen perfectly. (Corr., IV,5)

Pope conceived of the ethic epistles as a scheme by which to reconcile poetry and philosophy, but found that he became more and more philosophical, without the prospect of ever becoming truly so. The cost of this uncertain gain was less poetry, less capacity to infuse the attitudes adopted and rejected by the poem with life and attraction. As I have suggested above, the successive, even simultaneous availability of antagonistic positions is vital to the poem’s ability to capture the human problem of seeing the world as if from two points of view—our limited perspective, and some broader, objective, enlightened, or inspired perspective. While these two points of view could not be identified perfectly with poetic and philosophic perspectives, Pope recognizes seeing things in only one way as part of the problem for continuing to write his moral book. Anonymous publication gave Pope the opportunity to escape his reputation and (paradoxically, given his prominence) have his work assume greater authority. He writes to Swift (in a joint letter with Bolingbroke), 15 September 1734, apologizing for his incognito, even though Swift had been told of the scheme of ethics: “The design of concealing myself was good, and had its full effect; I was thought a divine, a philosopher, and what not? and my doctrine had a sanction I could not have given to it” (Corr., III,433). Pope played on his anonymity in correspondence with close intimates. In writing of the poem to John Caryll, 8 March 1732/33, Pope sets Caryll upon two of the more obviously or apparently heterodox phrases of the poem (I.43–44 and 267–68: “Of Systems possible, if ’tis confest / That wisdom infinite must form the best”; “All are but parts of one stupendous whole, / Whose body Nature is, and God the soul”):

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The town is now very full of a new poem intitled an Essay on Man, attributed, I think with reason, to a divine. It has merit in my opinion but not so much as they give it; at least it is incorrect and has some inaccuracies in the expressions; one or two of an unhappy kind, for they may cause the author’s sense to be turned, contrary to what I think his intention a little unorthodoxically. Nothing is so plain as that he quits his proper subject, this present world, to insert his belief of a future state and yet there is an If instead of a Since that would overthrow his meaning and at the end he uses the Words God, the Soul of the World, which at first glance may be taken for heathenism, while his whole paragraph proves him quite Christian in his system, from Man up to Seraphim. I want to know your opinion of it after twice or thrice reading. I give you my thoughts very candidly of it [ . . . ][.] (Corr., III,354) Pope knows that his poem blurs lines between the heathenish (deistic, materialistic) and the pious, between certainty of God’s infinite wisdom and doubt of it. He notes that the local instances of such blurring are caused by very minor decisions, such as the selection of a conjunction (“if ” rather than “since”). Pope has either seen these potentially unorthodox readings only after the poem’s publication and seeks reassurance they are not too glaring; or he wants to see if his risks, his dramatizations of doubt and of the concurrence of antagonistic views, have their force for his first audience.

The Poem in Conte xt: “The Design” In order to give a stronger sense of the argument of the poem and its rich intertexture of ideas and themes from earlier and contemporary philosophy, I offer here a contextualized reading of each epistle. The two dominant concerns to emerge are, first, the perceptual and epistemological definition and limitation of the human point of view; second, the natural history of human sociability. Pope aims to draw these two concerns into relation in the poem: he aims to make knowledge of the kind of animal people are a determining factor in their choice of how to live.

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Let us revisit “The Design” of the poem before launching into these readings. 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. As we have seen above, the Essay is considered as part of a larger scheme comprehending the Epistles to Several Persons. It is not perfectly clear whether Pope is announcing the Essay on Man as a prolegomenon to these “pieces on Human Life and Manners,” or as the first installment of them. The latter seems more likely, given the allusion to Francis Bacon. In the dedicatory epistle to his Essayes, Bacon explains that they are his most “Currant” texts, his texts with the greatest ready circulation and general diffusion, because they come home to men’s business and bosoms.48 Bacon’s essays largely treat human concerns as a matter of practice, with a concomitant emphasis on the dispositions, natures, or temperaments of different kinds of people, and how these might affect their aptitude for one kind of business over another. When writing “Of Simulation and Dissimulation,” for example, Bacon suggests that “The best Composition, and Temperature is, to have Opennesse in Fame and Opinion; Secrecy in Habit; Dissimulation in seasonable use; and a Power to faigne, if there be no Remedy.”49 But practical knowledge of this sort is not to be distinguished from broader or more general knowledge. In Bacon’s taxonomy of the current state of all sciences, �e Advancement of Learning, he devotes some space to “HVMANE PHILOSOPHY or HVMANITIE, which hath two parts: The one considereth Man segregate or distributively: The other congregate, or in 48 Bacon, Essayes, p. 5. 49 Ibid., p. 22.

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societie.” When it comes to the moral part of human philosophy, Bacon makes the first task “to set downe Sound and true distributions and descriptions of the seueral characters & tempers of mens Natures and dispositions specially hauing regard to those differences which are most radicall in being the fountayns and Causes of the rest or most frequent in Concurrence or Commixture.”50 One must know the current state of the various human characters and tempers in order to be able to suggest methods of improving them. So if Pope is announcing Baconian intentions in “The Design,” they would be to intermingle the practical and theoretical consideration of human character, in order to improve it. The Essay in that case is more than an abstract prelude to the other projected and realized epistles of the grand scheme. When Pope told Spence that “The first epistle is to be to the whole work what a scale is to a book of maps” (I,129–30, no. 294), he was no more divorcing it from the rest of the epistolary scheme than he does the Essay from the other books of epistles here in “The Design.” The second paragraph of “The Design” goes on to talk rather grandly about the “science of Human Nature,” which Pope thinks should, like anatomy, focus on the “large, open, and perceptible parts” of its subject, rather than getting lost in fine discriminations that “have diminished the practice, more than advanced the theory, of Morality.” Pope’s phrase does not seem to appear in English before his use (Isaac Watts uses the same phrase in the same year as Pope). The closely allied phrase “science of man” is not frequently used, though it does appear in several translations of French works of morality and metaphysics that Pope probably knew: Charron’s Of Wisdom, Malebranche’s Search after Truth, Huet’s Essay on the Weakness of Human Understanding. One of the closest echoes of Pope’s phrase, and, I would argue, his attitudes in the Essay, is at the close of the first book of David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, as Hume is concluding his discussion of the skeptical philosophy: Human Nature is the only science of man; and yet has been hitherto the most neglected. ’Twill be sufficient for me, if I can bring it a little more into fashion; and the hope of this serves to compose 50 Bacon, Advancement, p. 147.

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my temper from that spleen, and invigorate it from that indolence, which sometimes prevail upon me. If the reader finds himself in the same easy disposition, let him follow me in my future speculations. If not, let him follow his inclination, and wait the returns of application and good humour.51 Hume’s attitude here recognizes the inseparability of that which is studied and that which is studying this human science: they are the same human nature. Attitudes, characters, dispositions, passing or permanent, cannot be overlooked in the practice of this science. Pope’s poem, an earlier attempt to bring together the theory and practice of the science of human nature, is no less focused on the attitudes into which he can encourage readers than Hume is in his Treatise.

The Poem in Context: Epistle I Epistle I asserts that the human perspective on the world is radically circumscribed, but that the world itself is perfectly complete and the product of infinite wisdom. How the speaker can make the second assertion after the first is one of the larger antagonisms of the Essay. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Bacon attempted a taxonomy of the sciences. At the close of the century, John Locke published his own vastly influential essay, a text that works through the implications of one central realization: that all the knowledge people have is from ideas, and those ideas have only two sources: sensation and, secondarily, reflection. These ideas are not universal intellectual forms, in which people participate by having them. Rather, they are private mental contents. Like many projects that attempt to give certainty to what are and what can be said about our mental states, Locke’s Essay at the same time circumscribes human knowledge radically: 51 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. by P. H. Nidditch, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), I.iv.7, p. 273. Solomon, �e Rape of the Text, p. 145, notes the dearth of studies that relate Pope and Hume. I made an earlier attempt to join the two figures in Pope and Berkeley: �e Language of Poetry and Philosophy (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 149–60.

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Our Knowledge being so narrow, as I have shew’d, it will, perhaps, give us some Light into the present State of our minds, if we look a little into the dark side, and take a view of our Ignorance: which being infinitely larger than our Knowledge, may serve much to the quieting of Disputes, and Improvement of useful Knowledge; if discovering how far we have clear and distinct Ideas, we confine our Thoughts within the Contemplation of those Things, that are within the reach of our Understandings, and launch not out into that Abyss of Darkness (where we have not Eyes to see, nor Faculties to perceive any thing,) out of a Presumption, that nothing is beyond our Comprehension. [ . . . ] All the simple Ideas we have are confined (as I have shewn) to those we receive from corporeal Objects by Sensation, and from the Operations of our own Minds as the Objects of Reflection. But how much these few and narrow Inlets are disproportionate to the vast whole Extent of all Beings, will not be hard to persuade those, who are not so foolish, as to think their span the measure of all Things. What other simple Ideas ’tis possible the Creatures in other parts of the Universe may have, by the Assistance of Senses and Faculties more or perfecter, than we have, or different from ours, ’tis not for us to determine. [ . . . ] The Ignorance, and Darkness that is in us, not more hinders, nor confines the Knowledge, that is in others, than the blindness of a Mole is an Argument against the quick-sightedness of an Eagle. He that will consider the Infinite Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of the Creator of all Things, will find Reason to think, it was not all laid out upon so inconsiderable, mean, and impotent a Creature, as he will find Man to be; who in all probability, is one of the lowest of all intellectual Beings. What Faculties therefore other Species of Creatures have to penetrate into the Nature, and inmost Constitutions of Things; what Ideas they may receive of them, far different from ours, we know not. [ . . . ] the intellectual and sensible World, are in this perfectly alike; That that part, which we see of either of them, holds no proportion with what we see not; And whatsoever we can reach with our Eyes, or our Thoughts of either of them, is but a point, almost nothing, in comparison of the rest.52 52 Locke, IV.iii.22–33, pp. 553–54. Grant McColley, “Locke’s Essay Concerning

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Pope’s assertion that “’Tis but a part we see, and not a whole” (I.60) continues a line of argument that begins with the first numbered section of the epistle at I.17: God may be active in many worlds, but it is only in our own world that God’s effects are evident to us. I.29– 32 points to the intellectual presumption of talking as if we perceived the world from a perspective beyond the human, and the epistle goes on to compare the limitations of human sensory experience and therefore knowledge with the more enlarged knowledge spirits possess, and to compare the various sensory endowments of different parts of the animal creation (as at I.173–206). Joseph Butler, in his 1726 sermons at the Rolls Chapel, describes humanity as a similar predicament: since the constitution of nature, and the methods and designs of providence, in the government of the world, are above our comprehension, we should acquiesce in, and rest satisfied with our ignorance, turn our thoughts from that which is above and beyond us, and apply ourselves to that which is level to our capacities, and which is our real business and concern. [. . .] The economy of the universe, the course of nature, almighty power exerted in the creation and government of the world, is out of our reach.53 In these circumstances, human duty is keeping heart and managing the affections—affective and ethical, rather than epistemic. Pope suggests people should be thankful their knowledge is limited, because if they knew what spirits know, life on earth would be unbearable, as it would be for lambs if they knew they were destined for slaughter (I.77–82 with Pope confusing knowledge of the world with knowledge of what is fated). This discomfiting suggestion is the basis on which readers are told to adopt an attitude: “Hope humbly” (I.91). Admitting ignorance is the beginning of a moral and religious hope. Human Understanding as a Partial Source of Pope’s Essay on Man,” �e Open Court 46 (1932): 581–84 (p. 582), points out that Locke and Pope are close to one another on the limits of human knowledge. 53 �e Works of Bishop Butler, ed. by David E. White (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), pp. 144, 145.

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As seen above, however, when Pope writes to Caryll after the anonymous publication of Epistle I, the religious attitude encouraged is conditional. The hypothesis of an infinite wisdom forming the best of all possible systems is just that—a hypothesis, not a selfevident fact: “Of Systems possible, if ’tis confest / That wisdom infinite must form the best [ . . . ]” (I.43–44). Only “if ” this is conceded, and the universe is acknowledged to be perfectly full, does it follow that there must be such a rank as man (I.48—the existence of infinite wisdom itself is unchallenged). That conclusion seems to be accepted in the poem even if it is almost perfectly redundant from a philosophical point of view. The poem works by hypothesis and inference, however, rather than the assumption that the universe is an embodiment of perfect reason, a reason that binds God as much as any other agent. As has been noted more than once already, Pope believes that the evidence of the world needs some serious explanation before anyone of merely human capacities will see it as the expression of perfect wisdom. Belief that the world exhibits, follows, even embodies reason is presented by some writers with whom Pope has been compared as a means of inferring an infinitely wise God. The Continental state philosopher, academician, and polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz seeks reasons for things in the world being as they are in his �eodicy (1710). Although Pope wrote to Warburton, once the latter’s defense of the Essay had been published (see below), that “I never in my life read a Line of Leibniz,” and later wrote to Louis Racine that “my Opinions are intirely different from those of Spinoza; or even of Leibnitz,” the confluence of the Essay and the Essais de �éodicée is suggestive, at least at a local level. 54 It is a parallel that has tempted readers of the Essay including Lessing and Mendelssohn (see below), and Joseph Warton. I ex54 Pope to Warburton, 2 February 1738/39, Corr., IV,164; Pope to Louis Racine, 1 September 1742, Corr., IV,416. Courtney Weiss Smith makes a valuable distinction between Pope and rationalists on this point in Empiricist Devotions, p. 169. See also James E. Force, “Holy Grail, (Almost) Wholly Newton: A Guide to the Newtonian and Anti-Newtonian Elements in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man,” Enlightenment and Dissent 25, “Isaac Newton in the Eighteenth Century,” ed. by Stephen D. Snobelen (2009): 106–34, p. 116 for the view that Pope believes in a God who creates freely, rather than being determined by absolute reason.

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plore it here while remaining agnostic on the question of whether Pope had read Leibniz. Leibniz’s manner of proceeding is unlike Locke’s approach: human thought participates in broader rational structures governing the universe, rather than merely operating about ideas acquired through sensation and reflection. Following reason, once it is acknowledged that the world is contingent (could have been otherwise), one must seek some rational principle outside the universe that has its reason for being located within itself. God is this principle. Leibniz’s account of God’s providence must deal with the same tension between the foreseen and the predetermined recognized by Boethius. Leibniz’s world is very much like that Pope describes hypothetically, a world that infinite wisdom has selected from the infinite number of possible worlds. God populates infinite contingency in the best way possible: “And even though one should fill all times and all places, it still remains true that one might have filled them in innumerable ways, and that there is an infinitude of possible worlds among which God must needs have chosen the best, since he does nothing without acting in accordance with supreme reason.”55 As well as being a rational universe, this is a universe in which “all must full or not coherent be” (I.45), a universe of plenitude. Leibniz agrees that in such a universe “There must be, somewhere, such a rank as Man” (I.48), specifying a little more closely where man sits in the order of sensitive and rational creatures: “God, having found among 55 Leibniz, p. 128; see also Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Essais de �éodicée sur la bonté de dieu, la liberté de l’ homme et l’origine du mal, intro. by Jacques Brunschwig (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), p. 108. The contingency of the world is perhaps strongly present in the mind of the eighteenth-century natural religionist, as in David Martin, A Discourse of Natural Religion (London, 1720), p. 162: “In truth, we know little more from the mere light of natural reason, than that there is a God who existing of himself from all eternity, exists necessarily, and that all other beings have only a contingent existence; they have not been eternally, and they may be no more; their being thus borders on all sides upon the nothing which went before ’em.” Catherine Wilson, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 297–98, refers to a 1737 notice of the �eodicy suggesting that either possible worlds God did not select were outside of God, or God’s mind was littered with infinite less preferable worlds he had discarded—neither of which seems a desirable picture of the divine intellect.

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the possible beings some rational creatures who misuse their reason, gave existence to those who are included in the best possible plan of the universe.”56 Pope’s description of this full universe has as its aim the encouragement of a submissive attitude, in which humans should not aspire to that which is beyond them, something that might result in a void in the “full creation” (I.243). Such a warning can only be rhetorical: if this is God’s order, and it is not possible to alter our rank at our will, there is no danger of breaking the chain, or leaving in it what Leibniz calls “a gap in the order of species.”57 Perhaps somewhat more dispassionately than Pope, Leibniz nonetheless argues that judging infinite wisdom on the basis of a partial view is an act of “Madness, Pride! Impiety!” (I.258) which fails to recognize that “All partial Evil, [is] universal Good” (I.292): God wills order and good; but it happens sometimes that what is disorder in the part is order in the whole. [ . . . ] God’s object has in it something infinite, his cares embrace the universe: what we know thereof is almost nothing, and we desire to gauge his wisdom and his goodness by our knowledge. What temerity, or rather what absurdity!58 When Pope, writing to Louis Racine, disavowed reading Leibniz, he went on to say that his opinions were “on the contrary conformable to those of Mons: Pascal & Mons. Fenelon.” It is to Pascal and other French moralists on the subject of human weakness, and to Epistle II, that I now turn. 56 Leibniz, p. 190; Leibniz, �éodicée, p. 173. This is the first connection JeanPierre de Crousaz refers to when he suggests that Pope is dependent upon the system of Leibniz, in An Examination of Mr Pope’s Essay on Man, trans. by Elizabeth Carter (London, 1739), p. 16. John Hostler, Leibniz’s Moral Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1975), p. 78, notes that Leibniz “stresses the criterion of ‘order’ believing (quite plausibly) that it is only in an ordered series that maximal variety can be achieved, since a random series might well leave ‘gaps’ into which further possible individuals could be fitted. The perfection of a complex system such as the universe is thus to be understood as a function of variety and order together.” 57 Leibniz, p. 131; Leibniz, �éodicée, p. 111. 58 Leibniz, p. 201, 206; Leibniz, �éodicée, pp. 183–84, 189–90.

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The Poem in Context: Epistle II I pointed above to a problem in the intuitions on which Epistle I rests: the universe was created by an infinitely wise being, who must therefore have made it the best possible universe; there is evidence of imperfection in the creation that requires careful, sustained explanation. This is not a problem to be escaped from in the Essay, but rather a realization about the kind of creatures people are: people have a sharp perception of their own, and sometimes others’, suffering, but they see it as part of a larger system the principles of which are difficult or impossible to grasp. The opening of Epistle II portrays people in this middle position, caught between two perspectives: Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest, In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast; In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer, Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much: Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d; Still by himself abus’d, or disabus’d; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl’d: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

(II.3–18)

The antithetical half lines here enact the division between, and union of, the different elements in humankind, with marked caesurae in I.15–17 resolved into the final line of the verse paragraph that retains a conceptual disjunction (glory, jest and riddle) within a line less marked by syntactic or rhythmic division (the caesura is light and does not separate out the contrasted elements).

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Leibniz objected to the irrationalism of earlier French writers on the limits of human knowledge in the face of divine will, such as Pierre Bayle and Michel de Montaigne, arguing that there may well be acts of God that are above reason, but there are none that are against reason.59 Pascal, whose Pensées Pope had read (see Corr., III, 173) in Basil Kennet’s translation of 1704, adopts an extreme position in which divinity is at once inferable from the world (indeed the world might have been made in part to punish those who, observing it, found not enough evidence of God to believe), but beyond all reason: “The last process of Reason is to discover, that there’s an Infinity of things which utterly surpass its force. And it must be very weak if it arrive not at this Discovery.”60 Pascal, then, presents a radical perspectivalism: God, though hidden, is known through revelation, but human law, custom, and reason are forever separated from God by the fall.61 Pascal’s provocation distinguishes strictly between human and divine art even while comparing them, asserting the unavailability of rules of truth and morality such as are present in the rules of human arts such as painting.62 Pascal’s perspectivalism leads him to reflections on the human position in creation that are very close to Pope: 59 Leibniz, pp. 107–8. 60 Pascal, p. 51. See also Pascal, Pensées, ed. by Michel Le Guern (Paris: Gallimard, 1977; repr. 2004), p. 284, no. 429, and the passage cited on p. 147, no. 177. See Emile Audra, L’Influence française dans l’oeuvre de Pope (Paris: Champion, 1931), pp. 483–84. For a different manner of casting doubt on reason, see Pierre Daniel Huet, Traité philosophique de la foiblesse de l’esprit humain (Amsterdam, 1723). Huet is a skeptic, attempting to reconcile skepticism with academicism and empiricism. Reason is so imperfect that it is foolhardy to claim one even knows well what reason is, p. 13: “étant persuadé qu’on ne peut rien connoître par la Raison avec une parfaite certitude, je serois insensé si je prétendois connoître clairement & certainement, ce que c’est la Verité, & la Raison.” (“being persuaded that one can know nothing with perfect certainty by reason, I would be senseless if I pretended to know clearly and certainly what reason and truth are.”) All translations are my own unless otherwise attributed. 61 That the lack of true law is a historical fact is seen at Pensées, p. 96, nos. 79–80, where Pascal writes of the coincidence of force and justice, which results from fallenness: “Veri juris, nous n’avons plus” (no. 79)—“we have true law no more.” 62 Ibid., p. 71, no. 19. This thought is not present in Kennet’s text.

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What a Chimæra then is Man! what a surprising Novelty! what a confused Chaos! what a Subject of Contradiction! A profess’d Judge of All things; and yet a feeble Worm of the Earth: the Great Depositary and Guardian of Truth; and yet a meer huddle of Uncertainty: the Glory and the Scandal of the Universe! [ . . . ] For what is Man amongst the Natures which encompass him? In one View he appears as Unity to Infinity, in another as All to Nothing: and must therefore be the medium between these Extremes: alike distant from that Nothing whence he was taken, and from that Infinity in which he is swallow’d up. His Understanding holds the same rank in the order of Beings, as his Body in the Material system. [ . . . ] This middle state and condition is common to all our Faculties.63 Yet here there is also an important difference between Pope and Pascal: Pascal’s perspectivalism works a negation of all human knowledge from which only a mystical intuition can emerge; Pope, on the other hand, encourages his readers to recognize the limits of their perspective, to reason from what they know, and to curb the vanity of sciences that pretend this perspective could be entirely transcended (II.19–52). Pascal seems to rule out knowledge altogether in describing the relationship between man and the universe: “If a Man did but begin with the Study of himself, he would soon find how incapable he was of proceeding farther. For what possibility is there, that the Part should contain the whole? It seems, however, more reasonable that we should, at least, aspire to the knowledge of the other Parts; to which we bear some proportion and resemblance. But then, the Parts of the World are so nicely interwoven, so exquisitely link’d and encased one within the other, that I look upon it as impossible to understand one without another, or, even, without All.”64 The preface prepared for the first edition of Pascal’s Pensées, published in 1670, notes that Pascal thought the passions a great obstacle to faith.65 Pointing to the passions as the force in human moral psy63 Pascal, pp. 185, 190–91; see also Pensées, p. 113, no. 122, and p. 155, no. 185. 64 Pascal, pp. 349–50; see also Pascal, Pensées, p. 158, no. 185. 65 Pascal, Pensées, “Préface [de l’édition de Port-Royal],” p. 57.

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chology that disrupts the work of reason is a very common feature of moral discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his call to limit the vanity of science Pope notes that, for the person who aspires in human arts and sciences, “What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone” (II.41–42). But one of the burdens of Epistle II is the rehabilitation of the passions from this kind of accusation, an exercise that is very probably Pope’s most original emphasis on a moral theme in the Essay.66 The total depravity of human will following the fall is a topic that is present in many varieties of French moralism of the seventeenth century, and it is one that gives a central place to self-love. According to Spence, Pope said (perhaps as early as 1728) that “As L’Esprit, Rochefoucauld, and that sort of people prove that all virtues are disguised vices, I would engage to prove all vices to be disguised virtues. Neither, indeed, is true, but this would be a more agreeable subject, and would overturn their whole scheme.”67 (It is worth noting Pope’s willingness to pursue a line of argument for its agreeableness rather than its truth.) Virtue was redescribed as just so many forms of self-liking in disguise by Rochefoucauld: “Nous sommes si préoccupés en notre faveur que souvent ce que nous prenons pour des vertus n’est que des vices qui leur ressemblent, et que l’amour-propre nous déguise.”68 In the earlier of the two surviving manuscripts of the poem, in a shoulder note near material now found at II.230, there is a couplet struck through that makes Pope’s opposition to Rochefoucauld explicit: “Thus In spite of all the French66 Bertrand A. Goldgar, “Pope’s Theory of the Passions: The Background of Epistle II of the Essay on Man,” Philological Quarterly 41:4 (1962): 730–43, pp. 738–39, where the relative originality of Pope’s rehabilitation of the passions as part of an ultimately orderly universe is noted. Nuttall, Pope’s Essay on Man, p. 92, says that II.57ff. would have been “historically significant” for doubting reason and would have shifted the ground under the feet of Pope’s readers. 67 Spence, I,210, no. 517. Osborn notes the connection to MS lines from the Essay. 68 La Rochefoucauld, Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes morales suivi de réflexions diverses et des maximes de Madame de Sablé, ed. by Jean Lafond (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 143–44, Maximes supprimées, no. 67. “We are so prepossessed in our own favor that often what we take for virtues are nothing but the vices that resemble them, and which self-liking disguises to us.” The maxim becomes an epigraph in later editions, and in the English translation, Moral Reflections and Maxims, trans. by anon. (London, 1706), p. 1: “Our Vertues, most commonly, are but Vices disguised.”

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mans witty lies / Most Vices seem are but Virtues in disguise.’ (See notes.) Mack’s identification of this Frenchman with Rochefoucauld is uncontroversial. Pope’s remark to Spence, however, suggests he thought of these writers (French Augustinian moralists) as a more or less coherent group. Rehabilitating the passions, questioning the necessity of their subjugation to reason in order to make virtue possible, allows Pope to embrace strife in the moral world, and to portray human morality as a field in which jarring forces are reconciled.69 Pierre Nicole, an author of the Port-Royal group of Jansenists with whom Pascal also had some association, exhibits the extreme form of Augustinian moralism, which in this context means taking a radical view of the corrupting effect of the fall on the soul of man. Man is so corrupted that “The bent of his Nature, is to reduce him as much as can be to the condition of Brutes.” It is in this context of the anthropology of the fall that Nicole says, “it is not Reason which makes use of Passions, but Passions which make use of Reason to compass their ends; and this is all the stead Reason stands us in for the most part.”70 Pope is more optimistic: reason maintains at least some regulatory role with respect to the passions, which it should subject and compound (II.116). Pope, however, does not go as far as Montaigne in asserting the superiority of the passions over reason: the greatest and most noble Actions of the Soul proceed from, and stand in need of, this Impulse of Passions. [ . . . ] there is no brave and spiritual Virtue, without some irregular Agitation. [ . . . ] Passions [ . . . ] are as so many Spurs and Instruments pricking on the Soul to vertuous Actions [ . . . ] By the Dislocation that Passions cause in our Reason, we must become Vertuous: 69 On this point, see Albert O. Hirschman, �e Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 47: “toward the end of the seventeenth and more fully in the course of the eighteenth century, the passions were rehabilitated as the essence of life and as a potentially creative force.” 70 Pierre Nicole, Moral Essays, Contain’d in Several Treatises on Many Important Duties, trans. by a person of quality, 2 vols. (in one) (London, 1677–84), “Of the Weakness of Man,” pp. 57, 43.

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By its Extirpation occasioned by Madness, as the Image of Death, we become Diviners and Prophets. I was never so willing to believe Philosophy in any thing, as this. ’Tis a Pure Enthusiasme, wherewith Sacred Truth has inspir’d the Spirit of Philosophy, which makes it confess contrary to its own Proposition, that the most calm, composed, and healthful Estate of the Soul, that Philosophy can seat it in, is not its best Condition.71 If this passage from Montaigne represents an antagonistic pole to the rationalism of Leibniz—a belief in that which is against and not just above reason—Pope is steering betwixt the extremes. His account of the passions usefully held in antagonism to form a “balance of the mind” (II.120) is closer to Francis Hutcheson: “But which of them [the passions] could we have wanted, without greater Misery in the whole? They are by Nature ballanced against each other, like the Antagonist Muscles of the Body; either of which separately would have occasioned Distortion and irregular Motion, yet jointly they form a Machine, most accurately subservient to the Necessities, Convenience, and Happiness of a rational System.” 72 Montaigne, is, however, a significant presence at this point in the epistle. From the basic (physiological) inclination to be pleased by one thing or another, moral character or disposition is formed. Particular objects strike different sensitive beings in different ways, and the resulting pleasures forge pathways for differing human behaviors in the face of which reason is relatively impotent (II.127–60). Here Pope is close to Plutarch on the emergence of a particular ethos in the unreasonable part of the human mind: verie properly Manners be called in Greeke by the name ἠθος, to give us to understand, that they are nothing else (to speake plainely and after a grosse manner) but a certaine qualitie imprinted by long continuance of time, in that part of the soule which of it selfe is unreasonable: and is named ἠθος, for that the said reasonlesse part framed by reason, taketh this qualitie or dif71 Montaigne, “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde,” II,407–9. 72 Hutcheson, Essay, I.vi.3, pp. 120–21.

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ference (call it whether you will) by the meanes of long time and custom which they terme ἐθος.73 Plutarch thinks it is reason that leaves its impressions on the passions so that a disposition emerges over time. But for Pope the effect is produced by the mechanisms of response to pleasurable stimuli. For Pope the passion that dominates is the ruling passion. Again a parallel with Montaigne may be suggested: in our Bodies there is a Congregation of divers Humours, of which, that is the Soveraign, which according to the Complexion we are of, is commonly most predominant in us: So, though the Soul have in it divers motions to give it Agitation; yet must there of necessity be one to over-rule all the rest, though not with so necessary and absolute a Dominion, but that through the Flexibility and Inconstancy of the Soul, those of less Authority, may upon occasion, reassume their place, and make a little Sally in turn.74 Reason is “no guide, but still a guard” (II.162) with respect to the ruling passion. Body and mind are united in following the ruling passion, which is in fact a great divine gift because God grafts onto it “our best principle,” our virtue, and it operates like an impurity that strengthens and improves the performance of a metal—“The dross cements what else were too refin’d” (II.176–79). Given these virtues closely allied to our vices, it is a matter of will if particular individuals cultivate the allied virtue. Pope suggests that the same qualities of character can be turned to radically different ends, can 73 Plutarch, “Of Morall Vertue,” p. 67. For Pope’s knowledge of this translation, see Tom Jones, “Pope and Translations of Plutarch’s Moralia,” Translation and Literature, 12:2 (2003): 263–73. 74 Montaigne, “That we Laugh and Cry for the Same Thing,” I,420. Montaigne’s ground is never too solid under the foot, though: he elsewhere (“Of the Inconstancy of our Actions,” II,2–3) remarks that “I have often thought even the best Authors a little out, in so obstinately endeavouring to make of us any constant and solid Contexture. They chuse a general Air of a man, and according to that interpret all his Actions, of which, if some be so stiff and stubborn, that they cannot bend or writh them to any uniformity with the rest, they are presently imputed to dissimulation.”

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produce different paths of life: “The same ambition can destroy or save, / And makes a patriot as it makes a knave” (II.201–2). Moral character is inseparable from the circumstances in which it is developed and expressed. In language that recalls the distinction between partial human and total divine perspectives in Epistle I, human virtues are said only ever to be partial. Heaven’s “great view” is that which is able to extract good from bad, “And build on wants, and on defects of mind, / The joy, the peace, the glory of Mankind” (II.247–48). At this point in the epistle the argument begins to turn toward the subject of Epistle III, the production of social harmony by means of the reconciliation of contrasting interests (II.253–54). An additional sign of divine benevolence is the preference for our own situations and activities that self-love gives us: “Whate’er the Passion, knowledge, fame, or pelf, / Not one will change his neighbour with himself ” (II.261– 62). And here Pope echoes the words of Erasmus’s character Folly, as she explains the beneficial effects of self-love: “since the chief point of happiness is to wish to be what you actually are, certainly my Philautia [Self-love] accomplishes this in each and every way: no one is displeased by his own looks, his intelligence, his lineage, his place of residence, his education, his country.” 75 The different stages of life are also supplied with various attractions, naturally succeeding one another (and here Pope expresses a commonplace seen in writers such as Lucretius, Seneca, Rochester, and Hutcheson—see notes at II.275–82). The epistle concludes with an assertion of the reality of self-love even in the anticipation and consideration of other people: “Ev’n mean Self-love becomes, by force divine, / The scale to measure others wants by thine” (II.291–92). Still another French moralist, Jacques Abbadie, suggests that self-love is the proper reflection of God’s love: “’tis a great Errour to oppose Self-love to Divine, when ’tis well regulated: For pray, what else is it, duly to love our selves, but to love God; and to love God, but duly to love our selves?” 76 Self-love 75 Erasmus, p. 35. 76 Jacques Abbadie, �e Art of Knowing One-Self, or, An Enquiry into the Sources of Morality (Oxford, 1695), p. 134. For an expression of a similar view in the tradition of Anglican rationalism, see John Tillotson, Sermons Preach’d Upon Several Occasions, 2nd ed. (London, 1673), pp. 16–17.

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is not a principle that is transcended in the emergence and practice of the social affections, but is their foundation, and remains continuous within them. The mechanisms of the interrelation of self- and social love are more fully treated in Epistle III.

The Poem in Context: Epistle III The opening moods of this epistle are optative and imperative: let us remember the “great truth” that God “Acts to one end, but acts by various laws,” and look at the world, organized according to the great principle of love in all its organic operations (III.1–2, 7). The opposition of reason and passion in Epistle II is silently converted into an opposition between reason and instinct from III.79 onward. Pope asserts that creatures governed by either reason or instinct know how to achieve their proper bliss. But he is arguing against a background of the assertion of the inferiority of the human animal in comparison to others in achieving its proper ends. Pierre Charron states that each creature takes care of it self, makes the Study of it self the first and principal Business, hath Bounds set to its Desires, and employs not it self, nor hath any Aim beyond such a certain Compass: And yet thou, O vain Man, who wilt be grasping at the Universe, who pretendest to Knowledge unlimited, and takest upon thee to controul and to judge every Thing, art perfectly ignorant of thy own self; and not at any Pains to be otherwise.77 Human pride and vanity are seen in the pretensions of the reasoning animal and its commensurate failures. And Pope indeed closes a verse paragraph with assertions that seem to make instinct by far the surer guide: “the acting and comparing pow’rs / One in their [animal] nature [ . . . ] are two in ours.” God governs instinct, man reason (III.95–96, 98). The position is more fully elaborated by Plutarch (see notes for additional passages): 77 Pierre Charron, Of Wisdom, trans. by George Stanhope, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (London, 1707), I,3.

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if you say (as the trueth is) that nature is the schoole-mistresse, teaching them all this [i.e., the virtues most appropriate to their kind], you referre and educe the wisedome and intelligence of dumbe beasts unto the sagest and most perfect cause or principle that is; which if you think you may not call reason, nor prudence, ye ought then to seeke out some other name for it, that is better and more honourable[.]78 From III.109 the argument of the epistle shifts from the proper ends of each creature and their endowment with the proper means to attain them to the mutual interdependence of the entire creation, with links between species, and between members of species (III.109–14). Sexual attraction is a physical principle of the universe, dispersed through the elements of air, ether, water, and earth (III.115–18), and which affects man just as it affects all creatures. The species distinction of humans is inseparable from the long infancy of its offspring. Longer periods of the mutual exercise of care for children creates qualitatively different kinds of interaction: “That longer care contracts more lasting bands” (III.132). Pope’s account of the emergence of benevolent dispositions from impulsive acts sustains his view that self-love is on a continuum with social love, and is not its opposite. Love for parents is a matter of self-interest, gratitude for past care combined with the calculation that one will find oneself in a comparably dependent position with respect to one’s own children in the future. These feelings “spread the int’rest, and preserv’d the kind” (III.146). In contrast to Pope, Shaftesbury imagines self-interest to be a principle that corrupts social affection, rather than being its basis: “a greater attention to selfgood in every thing else, must of necessity take off from, and diminish the Affections towards other Good, that is to say, public and extensive Good, or good of the System.” 79 He satirizes the idea that “The love of kindred, children and posterity is purely love of self and 78 Plutarch, Morals, “That Brute Beasts Have Use of Reason,” p. 569. 79 Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue (London, 1699), p. 60. The text as revised for inclusion in Characteristics (Shaftesbury, p. 184) is less evocative of Pope.

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of one’s own immediate blood, as if, by this reckoning, all mankind were not included, all being of one blood and joined by intermarriages and alliances [ . . . ] thus love of one’s country and love of mankind must also be self-love.” Shaftesbury sees the grounding of all affective and social life in self-interest as a monomaniacal delusion, closed to the evidence of the impact of disinterested, though not necessarily better, passions such as “humour, caprice, zeal, faction” on our conduct.80 Francis Hutcheson sidesteps the problem of antagonistic self- and social love by positing social affection as what he calls a determination of our (human) nature: we are just the kind of creatures that take pleasure in the good of others. This tendency is not one of moral disposition, or of the emergence of certain kinds of cultural norm over an indeterminate prehistoric period in our evolution, but a fact about how God made us. Pope follows a different route, however: he is committed to self-love as the source of the benevolent affections. He describes the evolution of social affection through the family unit as if the emergence of a familial norm and the lifetime of particular families occurred on the same timescale (as if ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny). Pope is closer to a tradition that makes private and public ends coincide without negating the reality of self-interest. Cicero is one exemplar of this way of thinking, though he is not clear whether the coincidence of self- and social love is a natural condition of humanity, or produced by conscious effort of will. He states that “This, then, ought to be the chief end of all men, to make the interest of each individual and of the whole body politic identical.” Yet in an imagined speech of Antipater the social principle is inborn: “you were brought into the world under these conditions and have these inborn principles which you are in duty bound to obey and follow, that your interest shall be the interest of the community and conversely that the interest of the community shall be your interest as well.”81 Much closer to Pope’s time Joseph Butler has it that “private good” and “publick good [ . . . ] do indeed perfectly coincide; and to aim at publick and private good are so far from being inconsistent, that they mutually promote each other,” to the degree that “self-love 80 Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, pp. 54–55. 81 Cicero, On Duties, p. 293 (III.vi); p. 321 (III.xii).

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is one chief security of our right behaviour towards society.”82 The tension between ends and conditions in Cicero is echoed more strongly in Pope than in Butler. The fourth section of the epistle (III.147–98) suggests that social affection is coeval with self-love, and presents a utopian vision of early man—vegetarian, expressing a natural equality with animals in comparable worship of a common God. People are said to rise slowly to art by imitating the instinctive behaviors of other animals, a view Montaigne reports from Democritus (see notes at III.172). As the poem turns toward the emergence of political society, Pope displays a naturalism that is perhaps related to William Temple, for whom paternal authority is the source of political power: “the Father, by a natural Right as well as Authority, becomes a Governour in this little State.”83 Temple derides the theoretical positions that derive all forms of human political organization from posited tendencies toward either natural sociability or war among all, saying that in all recorded history people are found under the government of princes and magistrates.84 Pope’s view is more stadial than Temple’s, suggesting the existence of organized societies before the existence of kings (III.209), but naturalizing the paternal authority of kings. The progress Pope describes in the development of society is unusual: reproductive cycles bring extended family units into being; interaction between dispersed family units is prompted by the mutual unsatisfied needs they have as a result of divergent natural resources. At the same time or immediately afterward, sovereigns are selected on account of their natural superiority; sovereignty and quasi-divinity run together in the primitive imagination until monarchs die, which leads to the conjecture of a God. God is also known by tradition (a rare Catholic hint). The era of conjectural history at which Pope’s account has now arrived is an era of true piety, in the sense that fa82 �e Works of Bishop Butler, pp. 48–49. 83 Temple, “An Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government, Written in the Year 1672,” I,100. 84 Howard Erskine-Hill, “Pope on the Origins of Society,” in �e Enduring Legacy, pp. 79–93 (pp. 81–83, 90), mentions Temple in the context of his derogation of a moment of original contract as merely a poetic myth, and suggests that Pope believed “social contract was not [ . . . ] a radical discontinuity in life but rather the recognition through monarchy of the natural structure of patriarchalism.”

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milial duty encompassed all political and religious obligation. No answer is given to the rhetorical question of who invented tyranny, but superstition comes along with it, as do slavery and animal sacrifice; tyranny is the perverse form of natural piety.85 Tyranny seems to be posited as a natural state through which all societies pass, until the realization that self-love is best served by restraining the limits of liberty (III.269–82). Here there is a shift in tone away from philosophical or conjectural history toward satire: “Ev’n Kings learn’d justice and benevolence” when instructed by true self-interest. The following verse paragraph (from III.283) opens with an adverbial expression of time that is ambiguous: “’Twas then” a poet or patriot restored society to its original state of natural piety. Is Pope saying that the realization that self-love is best served by social concern is the message of the poet or patriot? Or that once this message has diffused itself through a society, a poet or patriot can take advantage of the situation, codify this natural intuition into law, and establish the kind of legal tradition and political philosophy that sees the state as the resolution of “jarring int’rests” (III.293)? One historical account of the emergence of political organization in humans is provided by Polybius (c. 200–c. 118 bc). This passage has to my knowledge been entirely neglected as a source for Epistle III, and I therefore cite it at length. What then are the beginnings I speak of and what is the first origin of political societies? [ . . . ] It is probable [ . . . ] that at the beginning men lived thus, herding together like animals and following the lead of the strongest and bravest, the ruler’s strength being here the sole limit to his power and the name we should give his rule being monarchy. But when in time feelings of sociability and companionship begin to grow in such gatherings of men, then kingship has struck root; and the notions of goodness, justice, and their opposites begin to arise in men. The manner in which these notions come into being is as follows. Men being all naturally inclined to sexual 85 Crousaz, Examination, p. 151, points out that “According to Mr Pope’s Supposition, the first Worship was without Sacrifices; yet the most ancient of all Histories, as well as those which follow’d it, teach us the contrary.”

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intercourse, and the consequence of this being the birth of children, whenever one of those who have been reared does not on growing up show gratitude to those who reared him or defend them, but on the contrary takes to speaking ill of them or ill treating them, it is evident that he will displease and offend those who have been familiar with his parents and have witnessed the care and pains they spent on attending to and feeding their children. For seeing that men are distinguished from the other animals by possessing the faculty of reason, it is obviously improbable that such a difference of conduct should escape them, as it escapes the other animals: they will notice the thing and be displeased at what is going on, looking to the future and reflecting that they may all meet with the same treatment. [ . . . ] Now when the leading and most powerful man among the people always throws the weight of his authority on the side of the notions on such matters which generally prevail, and when in the opinion of his subjects he apportions rewards and penalties according to desert, they yield obedience to him no longer because they fear his force, but rather because their judgement approves him; and they join in maintaining his rule even if he is quite enfeebled by age, defending him with one consent and battling against those who conspire to overthrow his rule. Thus by insensible degrees the monarch becomes a king, ferocity and force having yielded the supremacy to reason. [ . . . ] when they [kings] received the office by hereditary succession and found their safety now provided for, and more than sufficient provision of food, they gave way to their appetites owing to this superabundance, and came to think that the rulers must be distinguished from their subjects by a peculiar dress, that there should be a peculiar luxury and variety in the dressing and serving of their viands, and that they should meet with no denial in the pursuit of their amours, however lawless. These habits having given rise in the one case to envy and offence and in the other to an outburst of hatred and passionate resentment, the kingship changed into a tyranny[.]86 86 Polybius, Histories, trans. by W. R. Paton, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922–27), VI.ii, “On the Forms of States,” III,278–89. A seventeenth-

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Polybius derives monarchy from a naturalizing account of the emergence of virtue: self-interest dictates to us what we need for selfpreservation, including protection in our old age. When we see others fail to provide protection to their parents, we think ourselves into the situation and take offense on behalf of another. These feelings are natural, depend upon proportionality, and from them emerge more abstract ideas of good and evil, which are reinforced by royal approval and reward of good actions. Polybius attributes the emergence of tyranny to inherited title: with inheritance of sovereignty comes the belief among sovereigns that they are of a different class and must be distinguished by dress, luxury, and legal privilege. Their transgressions are the reason for legitimate rebellion. Tyranny is replaced by aristocracy, which degenerates into oligarchy. Oligarchy degenerates into democracy, which degenerates into anarchy, and eventually the people again choose a monarch: “Such is the cycle of political revolution, the course appointed by nature in which constitutions change, disappear, and finally return to the point from which they started.” Polybius, and Temple long after him, are philosophical historians rather than being theorists of right. The basis of theories of the evolution of the state should be what can be observed in and abstracted from known human behavior. Pope, close to them as he is, may therefore be said to take a historical attitude when thinking of the origins of society. That is, the relevant passages of Epistle III are an abstraction and reflection on known histories, rather than a conjectural reconstruction of what cannot be known historically but is analytically necessary. There is of course no firm line between historical and philosophical attitudes, but thinking of Pope in relation to these historians might encourage us to think of him as an early philosophical historian in the mode of Voltaire and the Scottish Enlightenment, rather than a late entrant into the controversial theory of sovereignty by divine right or election as seen in Hobbes, Filmer, Locke, century translation can be found in �e History of Polybius the Megalopolitan, trans. by Edward Grimeston (London, 1634), pp. 284–87. For Pope as a historical thinker, see Tom Jones, “Pope and the Ends of History: Faction, Atterbury, and Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion,” Studies in Philology 110:4 (Fall 2013): 880–902.

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and others. Still, the temporality of the poem’s language encourages conjecture in a way that Temple’s dismissal of abstract assertions of the sociable or solitary nature of man does not. Pope’s language presents a picture of conjectured prehistoric social life that naturalizes monarchy. When he describes the emergence of societies through the interaction of geographically diffused people with the same needs but diverse natural resources (III.199–208), a great deal hangs on whether the following “thus” is taken temporally or causally: “Thus States were form’d; the name of King unknown, / ’Till common int’rest plac’d the sway in one.” Does “thus” indicate a subsequent period, following the emergence of fully constituted societies with nothing but mutual need as their basis for regular interaction; or does “thus” suggest a causal explanation, that these instinctive interactions become organized as states only when the naturalized perception of common interest selects a monarch? Are states formed when common interest chooses a king, or do they exist prior to that act of mutual self-interest? Logical causes and historical facts are not to be separated in this form of historical writing: human nature and human ends cannot be prized apart. The epistle ends with a further modification to the two principles of human nature: first they were reason and passion; then reason and instinct; now the “two consistent motions act[ing] the Soul” (III.315) are a regard for the self, and a regard for the whole. In the following and final couplet Pope says that “God and Nature link’d the gen’ral frame, / And bade Self-love and Social be the same” (III.317–18). Is this assertion subtly different from saying that people have a motion toward the whole as well as themselves? It would be, were we not to take social love to represent a love for the entire creation, with all its interdependencies of human, animal, vegetable, mineral, and etherial powers. Epistle IV will conclude with such a view of the world, but not until it has treated its main subject, human happiness. For Epistle III, though, the extremes between which Pope steers are the divine ordination of appropriate holders of power and the natural emergence of legitimate power through biological contingencies and customs: these are the same, God’s will expressing itself in the historical contingency of human evolution, the coming together of the condition of being human and the ends of being human.

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The Poem in Context: Epistle IV Epistle IV unites contemporary British providentialism and a Stoic view of the interlinked economy of the universe. It is in this respect fundamentally comparable to the moral project of Francis Hutcheson and other writers who recognize the role that gratifying desire has in human happiness, yet who notice that some properly human desires can be gratified only through social or benevolent affections.87 In Hutcheson’s language, there are determinations of our nature that make us happy in others’ happiness or esteem; self-love makes us strive to satisfy these desires.88 Do these underlying determinations of human nature have a tendency that characterizes them as they encourage us, by the mechanism of self-love, toward happiness? Hutcheson’s description of such a tendency focuses on the concept of benevolence, whereas Pope’s focuses on virtue. He again confronts the problem of calamitous virtue in this epistle and attempts to justify the evident difference in material conditions of humanity by arguing that real happiness consists in hope and fear, which are equally available to all ranks of life, and to people who gain or suffer by fortune. Epistle IV represents a generic transition, away from the earlier more philosophical epistles and toward those later epistles of the ethic scheme that will treat particular virtues in practice, and of 87 See, for example, William Dudgeon, �e State of the Moral World Considered (Edinburgh, 1732), pp. 21–22; �e Works of Bishop Butler, pp. 113, 115. See the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for Dudgeon, including Warburton’s naming him among the tribe of freethinkers in his preface (ix). Dudgeon intervenes in the PopeCrousaz controversy in A View of the Necessitarian or Best Scheme: Freed from the Objections of M. Crousaz, in his Examination of Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man (London, 1739). See also Spacks, “Acts of Love and Knowledge,” p. 183: “gratification of the self requires gratification of others.” 88 For a further contemporary example of self-interest being preserved in the pursuit of the happiness of others, see my discussion of John Gay in Pope and Berkeley, pp. 142–43. Douglas H. White, Pope and the Context of Controversy: �e Manipulation of Ideas in An Essay on Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 5, 189, distinguishes between theories of morality based on self-love and those based on an innate sense of moral beauty, and recognizes that Pope is of the former camp, without recognizing that Pope’s view of love suggests a synthesis of self- and social love, not merely the entailment of the latter by the former.

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which the Epistles to Several Persons are the legacy. There are more illustrations in this epistle, more proper names, more exhortation to certain behaviors and attitudes, less abstract speculation. It is tempting to say that its argument is less sophisticated. Certainly the constant emphasis on the need to reconcile oneself to differences in material prosperity is intrusive. Pope runs together his earlier assertion that God’s laws are general, not partial, with the view, following fairly neatly from Epistle III, that happiness consists “not in the good of one, but all” (IV.37–38). But he is confusing the issue: nothing about God’s laws being general means that happiness has to be in the general good. God might perfectly well have instituted the pursuit of, and satisfaction in, entirely private good as a general law of human nature. The same thing might make everyone happy; but that is not to say that everyone’s being happy is necessary for me to be happy. Pope’s argument, however, has been that the very form of evolved humanity is an expression of God’s general law, and that it has tied up our happiness in one another. Pope’s mode of argument is to point to the way things are, and to suggest that disposition is the effect of infinite wisdom making the most good possible in the circumstances. Order in the poem was discussed above. In Epistle IV order means social distinction (a rank ordering of people) that will produce order as equality indirectly (through hope and fear). Pope holds the view that equality in the distribution of goods would lead to conflict: “But Fortune’s gifts if each alike possest,  / And each were equal, must not all contest?” (IV.63–64). Such attitudes may well be responding to Thomas Hobbes’s assertion of the fundamental equality of all people, and therefore the necessity of conflict: “from this equality of ability, ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our Ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which neverthelesse they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their End, (which is principally their owne conservation, and sometimes their delectation only,) endeavour to destroy, or subdue one an other.”89 Hobbes is a believer in a fundamental equality, the conflictual consequences of which are prevented only by social compact. Pope’s sympathies are in a different direction. In MLM 89 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), I.13, p. 87.

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there is a struck-through note in the shoulder of the manuscript page on which a version of the couplet just cited occurs, which reads “see Peace. Pasc. 291.311.” (See notes to IV.49–52 for further details.) The earlier of these citations from Pascal’s Pensées concerns the wisdom involved in venerating customary human distinctions. The second provides a reason: How wisely has it been ordain’d, to distinguish Men rather by the Exterior Shew, than by the Interior Endowments! Here’s another Person and I disputing the Way. Who shall have the preference in this Case? Why, the Better Man of the two. But I am as Good a Man as he: so that if no Expedient be found, he must beat me, or I must beat him. Well, but all this while, he has four Footmen at his Back, and I have but one. This is a Visible Advantage: we need only tell Noses, to discover it. ’Tis my part therefore to yield; and I am a Blockhead if I contest the Point. See here an easy Method of Peace, the great Safegard [sic] and Supreme Happiness of this World!90 The superficial approval of social distinction is common, but the underlying philosophical reasons for that approval are different. Pope’s text adds to Pascal’s sense of the practical value of social distinction an argument from the assumption of God’s legible (rather than hidden) providence. Given God’s justice, it is simply impossible that evident inequalities in the distribution of material goods could affect the happiness of the individual. At IV.93–94 Pope says anyone who thinks the vicious are happy and the virtuous woeful is blind. In MLM (LGA 299) at the point where related material is found Pope makes a note, beginning in Latin, the English that follows all struck through: “Cur bona malis, Mala bonis accidunt? Principio negatur. Tis one part of ye Goodness of Providence yt felicity & misfortune succeed alternately, yt men may bear ye one with moderation & ye other with Patience, & raises their minds to ye search of wt is better and more durable, in Virtue itself &c.” Aligned left on the same page, and interlineated in the material just cited, is found the following: “To bear his adverse & his 90 Pascal, p. 311.

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prosprous [illegible word scored through] fate this, with moderation that, yet still as—piring to a better State, That State wch Virtue gives & Wisdom finds.” Pope echoes the subtitle and first sentence of Seneca’s essay on providence: “Why, though there is a Providence, some Misfortunes befall Good Men. You have asked me, Lucilius, why, if a Providence rules the world, it still happens that many evils befall good men.”91 Seneca argues that adversity is a sign of favor, an opportunity to exercise talents. God “does not make a spoiled pet of a good man; he tests him, hardens him, and fits him for his own service” (I,7). Such attitudes carry through into the British eighteenth century, as, for example, in Addison’s deeply Senecan formulation in Cato: valour soars above What the world calls misfortune and affliction. These are not ills; else would they never fall On Heaven’s first favourites, and the best of men. The gods, in bounty, work up storms about us, That give mankind occasion to exert Their hidden strength, and throw out into practice Virtues, which shun the day, and lie concealed In the smooth seasons and the calms of life.92 Even when not attempting to reconstruct for the stage the value system of a Roman Stoic, eighteenth-century providentialists present human life on earth as “a State of Probation,” a test for the next world in which virtue and vice cannot immediately be rewarded and punished as that would make it possible to adopt virtuous or vicious behaviors for mercenary reasons.93 When writing on the appearance of universal good as partial evil, on the difficulties of limited humans judging accurately who the good and bad are, on the benefits of virtue in and for this life (IV.83– 91 Seneca, I,2–3, “Quare aliqua incommode bonis viris accidant, cum providentia sit. Quaesisti a me, Lucili, quid ita, si providentia mundus regeretur, multa bonis viris mala acciderent.” 92 Addison, II, p. 24. 93 John Balguy, Divine Rectitude: Or, A Brief Inquiry Concerning the Moral Perfections of the Deity (London, 1730), pp. 41, 49, 57.

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98), Pope made a note in the margin of MLM: “See Woolaston 71. 110. 182” (LGA 299). Here are the relevant passages from Wollaston’s Religion of Nature Delineated: Some things seem to be evil, which would not appear to be such, if we could see through the whole contexture of things. There are not more evil than good things in the world, but surely more of the latter. Many evils of this kind, as well as of the former, come by our own fault; some perhaps by way of punishment; some of physic; and some as the means to happiness, not otherwise to be obtaind. And if there is a future state, that which seems to be wrong now may be rectified hereafter. [ . . . ] it has been [ . . . ] objected of old, that things do not seem to be dealt according to reason, virtuous and good men very oft laboring under adversity, pains, persecutions, whilst vitious, wicked, cruel men prevail and flourish. But to this an answer [ . . . ] is ready. [ . . . ]We are not always certain, who are good, who wicked. [ . . . ] amidst so many enemies to virtue, so many infirmities as attend life, he [the virtuous man] cannot but be sometimes affected. But I have said, and say again, that the natural and usual effect of virtue is happiness; and if a virtuous man should in some respects be unhappy, yet still his virtue will make him less unhappy: for at least he injoys inward tranquillity, and a breast conscious of no evil. [ . . . ] In brief, virtue will make a man here, in any given circumstances, as happy as a man can be in those circumstances: or however it will make him happy hereafter in some other state: for ultimately, all taken together, happy he must be.94 Wollaston in effect argues from the complexity of the world to the likelihood of suffering: our perspective is limited, and there are so many events that appear to us as accidents it is impossible that even people who appear perfectly good will escape without suffering; yet the good will be happier in their suffering than the bad.95 94 Wollaston, pp. 71, 110, 182. 95 Wayne Hudson, Enlightenment and Modernity: �e English Deists and Reform (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), p. 39, describes Wollaston as an ontological

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Natural evil is to be understood, Pope says, as a product of nature, not God (IV.112, 115), recalling the earlier discussion of whether God’s disposition of the physical universe is permanent, or variable over time (I.145–48). Pope illustrates his position with brief evocations of the morally deserving who have nonetheless suffered by the operation of general natural laws (IV.123–30). He illustrates the difficulty of humans determining who is just or virtuous by reference to Calvin (IV.135–40): whose view is to be taken as to any individual’s virtue? And he comes to a Plotinian position on the acquisition of the goods of this world at IV.150–52: “the law decrees that to come safe out of battle is for fighting men, not for those that pray. The harvest comes home not for praying but for tilling; healthy days are not for those that neglect their health: we have no right to complain of the ignoble getting the richer harvest if they are the only workers in the fields, or the best.”96 Not to arrive at this recognition is to admit limitless desires for goods inappropriate to humans in general or particular. Recapitulating and varying themes from different parts of the Essay, such as the suitability of different pleasures to different ages of life (II.271–83), and the view that “Indians” are supposed to have of the afterlife (I.99–112), Pope tells us that worldly goods are not the proper reward of virtue. Virtue is a good in itself, and not to be thought of as an accompaniment to some other good (riches, nobility), nor are those other goods to be thought of as natural accompaniments to virtue. The inward satisfactions of virtue are recommended as the only true happiness (IV.309–26). The person who pursues virtue (inward as opposed to outward good) is then identified with the person who “looks thro’ Nature, up to Nature’s God”: Pursues that Chain which links th’immense design, Joins heav’n and earth, and mortal and divine; Sees, that no being any bliss can know, But touches some above, and some below; realist and notes that “The vast sales of his book suggest that it was read as an acceptable work on natural religion, and not a heterodox offering.” 96 Plotinus, III.2, 8, pp. 144–45.

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Learns, from this union of the rising Whole, The first, last purpose of the human soul; And knows where Faith, Law, Morals, all began, All end, in Love of God, and Love of Man.

(IV.332–40)

Pope is close to James Thomson here (see textual notes), and through him to Shaftesbury, in �e Moralists, where Philocles is addressing Palemon, saying that he rises from admiring the beauty of individual spirits to those of social and universal wholes: you rise to what is more general and, with a larger heart and mind more comprehensive, you generously seek that which is highest in the kind. [ . . . ] [His soul] seeks how to combine more beauties and by what coalition of these to form a beautiful society. It views communities, friendships, relations, duties and considers by what harmony of particular minds the general harmony is composed and commonweal established. Nor satisfied even with public good in one community of men, it frames itself a nobler object and with enlarged affection seeks the good of mankind. It dwells with pleasure amid that reason and those orders on which this fair correspondence and goodly interest is established. Laws, constitutions, civil and religious rites (whatever civilizes or polishes rude mankind!), the sciences and arts, philosophy, morals, virtue, the flourishing state of human affairs and the perfection of human nature—these are its delightful prospects, and this the charm of beauty which attracts it. Still ardent in this pursuit (such is its love of order and perfection), it rests not here nor satisfies itself with the beauty of a part but, extending further its communicative bounty, seeks the good of all and affects the interest and prosperity of the whole. True to its native world and higher country, it is here it seeks order and perfection, wishing the best and hoping still to find a just and wise administration. And since all hope of this were vain and idle if no universal mind presided, since without such a supreme intelligence and providential care the distracted universe must be condemned to

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suffer infinite calamities, it is here the generous mind labours to discover that healing cause by which the interest of the whole is securely established, the beauty of things, and the universal order happily sustained. (Shaftesbury, pp. 243–44) God has instituted a system in which the human position is fixed, and in which human happiness results from a certain kind of behavior; that behavior is, however, the affective extension of one’s self into other people, into other species, and to the whole creation through a realization of the interdependence of all goods, even the interdependence of evils and goods. Shaftesbury’s speaker Philocles defends nature from the allegation of error: I deny she errs and, when she seems most ignorant or perverse in her productions, I assert her even then as wise and provident as in her goodliest works. For it is not then that men complain of the world’s order or abhor the face of things, when they see various interests mixed and interfering—natures subordinate of different kinds opposed to one another and in their different operations submitted the higher to the lower. It is on the contrary from this order of inferior and superior things that we admire the world’s beauty, founded thus on contrarieties, while from such various and disagreeing principles a universal concord is established. (p. 244) Shaftesbury shares with Plotinus and Pope the idea that other beings may make use of human suffering and death: “man [ . . . ] in his turn submits to other natures and resigns his form a sacrifice in common to the rest of things” (p. 245). But neither thinker is quite as odd as Pope: their justification of inequality suggests that dying humans nourish a common order, whereas Pope suggests that higher orders of beings consume lower. Shaftesbury’s order rises, as it is made in the voluntary extension of the self to others; it is an ordered structure because it is God’s will that people behave in this way. Where Pope’s view must be distinguished from Shaftesbury’s/Philocles’s, though, is in Pope’s refusal to substitute beauty for virtue or nature for God: Pope nowhere suggests that an innate capacity for the perception of

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what is beautiful or harmonious is necessary to become virtuous. One has only to see that self-love is best served by an ever-widening circle of love’s objects. However social love becomes, it is always still self-love. Again, Pope’s God is personal, never entirely subsumed into system or nature, loved as a person, loving as a person, and having desires satisfied in the use of humans to certain ends—no matter how unorthodox it might be that God is understood as self-loving, and self-interested. God is an agent or spirit, with whom human agents or spirits are really analogous. Love of God is not love of a principle, or system, but of a person, or rather an infinite person, inasmuch as the qualities of such a person could be inferred by a finite person.97 The poem concludes by describing Bolingbroke in terms approaching those applied to Marcus Aurelius and Socrates, a person of virtue in prosperity and adversity who knows how “To fall with dignity, with temper rise” (IV.378). The conduct Bolingbroke has mastered and in which Pope wants to follow is presented as verbal: Pope aims to be formed by Bolingbroke’s conversation, “happily to steer” From grave to gay, from lively to severe; Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease, Intent to reason, or polite to please.

(IV.379–82)

The expression of virtue for Pope is verbal: it is through his verbal behavior that his attunement to his own interests in the world sys97 It may be a stretch to think of Pope’s poem in relation to Martin Buber’s I and �ou or John Robinson’s �ou Who Art: �e Concept of the Personality of God. But in the early eighteenth century writers such as John Clendon in Tractatus Philosophico�eologicus de Persona. Or, A Treatise of the Word Person (London, 1710) were investigating the personality of God. Clendon features in a list of freethinkers or conspirators against Christianity that Swift provides in Examiner 22 (28 December 1710) and 23 (4 January 1711), Swift vs. Mainwaring: The Examiner and The Medley, ed. by Frank H. Ellis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 128, 149. It is unclear what threat Swift took Clendon to represent, but Clendon does attack the language of the Trinity as an innovation introduced when the priesthood applied classical philosophical thinking and language to scripture (p. 92).

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tem will be realized for himself and others. The poem, reforming, persuading, affecting conduct with every step of its exposition, is at once a description and a performance of the linked world of mutual interest.

B o l i n g b r o k e , V o l t a i r e , Wa r b u r t o n The final section of this introduction will offer a selective reception history of the Essay, focusing on eighteenth-century philosophy. But some relationships between Pope’s Essay and other texts blur what we might have thought was a clear line between a source for the poem and an episode in its reception history. I will discuss three such relationships now, two very well documented, another less so. They are the relationships the poem has with Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke’s posthumously published “Letters or Essays Addressed to Alexander Pope, Esq.” and “Fragments or Minutes of Essays”; with William Warburton, through his defense of the Essay in A Vindication of Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man, revised as A Critical and Philosophical Commentary on Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man; and with section XXV of Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques, “Sur les Pensées de M. Pascal.” That Pope was working closely with Bolingbroke at the time of the Essay’s most active composition is evident from several of the letters quoted above. Spence records in 1734 that “He [Pope] mentioned then, and at several other times, how much (or rather how wholly) he himself was obliged to him [Bolingbroke] for the thoughts and reasonings in his moral works, and once in particular said that beside their frequent talking over that subject together, he had received (I think) seven or eight sheets from Lord Bolingbroke in relation to it, as I apprehended, by way of letters, both to direct the plan in general, and to supply the matter for the particular epistles” (I,138, no. 311). Spence’s modern editor agrees here with Maynard Mack in “Appendix A” to his edition of the poem, that though there may of course be much in the Essay that derives from conversation with and notes from Bolingbroke, it is impossible to determine whether similarities between the Essay and Bolingbroke’s posthumously published works are the result of Pope working from Bolingbroke’s hints, or

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Bolingbroke later recalling the verbal forms Pope used.98 Osborn points out that the “Essays” to Pope date from 1731, the year in which Bolingbroke is able to write to Swift with a detailed summary of the contents of the Essay, or even later.99 There are some marked differences in the philosophical concerns of Bolingbroke and Pope. Bolingbroke identifies his subject as “first philosophy,” by which he means “natural theology or theism, and natural religion or ethics.”100 Those are also concerns of Pope’s system of ethics, but Bolingbroke’s contrast of his project to that of Baconian science (as well as ontology and spiritual pneumatics) seems further from Pope, whose proximity to Bacon was discussed above. The topics often associated with that traditional British triumvirate of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume are given more attention by Bolingbroke than by Pope. There are discussions of sense perception (“Letters or Essays,” III,363); abstraction (“Letters or Essays,” III,434; “Fragments or Minutes,” V,17); language as signs for ideas (“Letters or Essays,” III,428–29); analogical thinking and the attributes of God (“Letters or Essays,” III,352, IV,175; “Fragments or Minutes,” V,522). 98 Osborn casts doubt on a story that Lord Bathurst saw a MS in Bolingbroke’s hand which contained the matter of the Essay and which Pope was to versify, Spence, II,632, Appendix B. 99 In the most sustained consideration of the evidence, Brean S. Hammond, Pope and Bolingbroke: A Study of Friendship and Influence (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), p. 75, notes, “the question of influence is not put out of court by chronological evidence, but remains open.” 100 Henry St John Viscount Bolingbroke, Works, ed. by David Mallet, 5 vols. (London, 1754), Anglistica & Americana, ed. by Bernhard Fabian, Edgar Mertner, Karl Schneider, and Marvin Spevack, 13 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968), “Letters or Essays,” III,325. Further references will be to work, volume, and page number given parenthetically in the main text. Hudson, Enlightenment and Modernity, pp. 45, 153, notes a greater separation between human and divine spheres in Bolingbroke than is the case in Pope’s work, and also separates Bolingbroke from the deists on account of his political conservatism: Bolingbroke “denied that there was any abstract ‘Reason and Nature of Things’, and rejected as absurd the idea that the law of nature governed God. Instead he maintained that man was confined to his own system, and knew nothing of the moral attributes of God. [ . . . ] Unlike the works of the writers known as the English deists, Bolingbroke’s philosophy was not the inspiration for republican developments in thought and practice. On the contrary, it ultimately tended to underwrite inherited forms of hierarchy and authority to which most of these writers were opposed.”

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Distinctions between perception and imagination, whether people can think of a triangle without specific properties, whether signs must always refer to ideas, how properly God can be said to will— these aren’t questions that much interest Pope. But Bolingbroke and Pope are close on the central concerns of the Essay: the limitations of human reason, the propriety of man’s place in the world, the natural derivation of social love from self-love: To be contented to know things, as God has made us capable of knowing them, is then a first principle necessary to secure us from falling into error. (“Letters or Essays,” III,329) The nature of every creature, his manner of being, is adapted to his state here, to the place he is to inhabit, and, as we may say to the part he is to act. If man was a creature inferior or superior to what he is, he would be a very preposterous creature in this system. (“Fragments or Minutes,” V,377) That true self-love and social are the same, as you have expressed a maxim, I have always thought most undeniably evident; or that the author of nature has so constituted the human system, that they coincide in it, may be easily demonstrated to any one who is able to compare a very few clear and determinate ideas. (“Letters or Essays,” IV,27) As our parents loved themselves in us, so we love ourselves in our children, and in those to whom we are most nearly related by blood. Thus far instinct improves self-love. Reason improves it further. (“Fragments or Minutes,” V,384) There is a sort of genealogy of law, in which nature begets natural law, natural law sociability, sociability union of societies by consent, and this union by consent the obligation of civil laws. When I make sociability the daughter of natural law, and the grandaughter of nature, I mean plainly this. Self-love, the original spring of human actions, directs us necessarily to sociability. (“Fragments or Minutes,” V,80)

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Where Bolingbroke and Pope differ in their conjectural account of the origins of society is in the origin they suppose for corruption. Bolingbroke is a critic of priestcraft, of the fabrication of occult knowledge to which ordinary people cannot have access, which allows the religious to manipulate and exploit the lay population (“Letters or Essays,” IV,42–43, 48–49). As seen above, Pope makes no causal priority, but says that tyranny and superstition emerge together (III.269–82); he does not actively criticize religious orders. It was through Bolingbroke that Pope met Voltaire during the latter’s residence in England in 1726–28.101 Voltaire claims in a letter to Pierre-Robert Le Cornier de Cideville, 20 September 1735, that the Essay is a verse paraphrase of the “Remarks on Pascal” that Voltaire composed between 1727 and their publication in 1734: I don’t know if the Abbé Re[s]nel has finished that [translation] of Pope’s essays on man that he had undertaken. They are moral epistles in verse that are a paraphrase of my little remarks on the thoughts of Pascal. He shows in beautiful verse that the nature of man has always been and always must have been that which it is. I’m astonished that a Normandy priest dare translate such truths.102 One might attribute Voltaire’s remark to egotism, a belief that others’ ideas are merely versions of his own. One of his marginal notes on his copy of the Essay suggests he thought Pope was merely repeating what he had said long ago (see notes at I.37). But it is possible that Pope and Voltaire talked about Pascal, an author of evident mutual interest, and it is also possible that Voltaire communicated some of his remarks on Pascal to his English friends before their publication in the Lettres, and before the publication of the Essay. 101 Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life, pp. 446–47. 102 Correspondence and Related Documents III, May 1734–June 1736, Letters D731– D1106, ed. by Theodore Besterman, The Complete Works of Voltaire 87 (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), letter D915, p. 208: “Je ne sçai si l’abbé du Renel a fini celle qu’il a entreprise des essais de Pope sur l’homme. Ce sont des épitres morales en vers qui sont la paraphrase de mes petites remarques sur les pensées de Pascal. Il prouve en baux vers que la nature de l’homme a toujours été et toujours dû être ce qu’elle est. Je suis bien étonné qu’un prêtre normand ose traduire de ces véritez.”

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Voltaire’s responses to Pascal are strikingly close to passages of the Essay: self-love is the same among all mankind, and [ . . . ] it is as necessary to them as the five senses; [ . . . ] this same self-love is given us by God for the preservation of our being, and [ . . . ] he has given us religion to regulate this self-love; [ . . . ] Man is not an enigma, as you picture it to yourself in order to have the pleasure of guessing it. Man appears to be where he belongs in nature, superior to animals, whom he is like in his organs, inferior to other beings, whom he resembles probably in thought. He is, like all we see, a mixture of good and evil, of pleasure and of pain. He is provided with passions in order that he may act, and with reason that he may govern his actions. If man were perfect, he would be God, and these so-called contrarieties, which you call contradictions, are the necessary ingredients that enter into the composition of man, who is what he must be. [ . . . ] It is the love of ourselves that helps the love of others; it is through our mutual needs that we are useful to the human race; it is the foundation of all commerce; it is the eternal bond of men. Without it not an art would have been invented, not a society of ten persons formed. [ . . . ] Far from complaining, we ought to thank the author of nature for giving us this instinct that ceaselessly carries us toward the future. The most precious treasure of man is that hope which allays our afflictions, and which paints future pleasures for us in our possession of present ones.103 Yet if Pope was paraphrasing, he took exception to some of Voltaire’s arguments. Pope joins Juvenal and Boethius in the idea that poverty is free from care. He is close to Pascal, who says the poor feel the shocks of fortune less as they are already near the bottom of the cycle of its wheel. Voltaire on the contrary believes that the poor 103 Voltaire, Letters, pp. 121–22, 127, 131–32; see also Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, ed. by Gustave Lanson and André M. Rousseau, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier, 1964), II,188–89, 197, 204. The introduction to this edition, I,xxxv–xxxix, notes that the sixth “Remark” is dated to 1727, but that while Voltaire probably developed materials for the Lettres in England, he is unlikely to have completed them until after his return to France.

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are more subject to the shocks of fortune: “It is false that the humble are less disturbed than the great; on the contrary, their despair is more acute because they have fewer resources.”104 Voltaire maintains the limitation of human reason, the middle position of the human in the creation, the metaphysical priority of self-love as the origin of society and culture, and the good of hope; but he challenges the conservative skepticism of Pascal, and Pope, in attributing happy freedom from care to the poor, and equality of hopes and fears to the species in general no matter what their rank. Voltaire anticipates the Johnsonian critique of Pope’s conservatism. (I return to Voltaire’s assessment of the poem and some of its intellectual inheritance below.) If Bolingbroke is one conduit between French moralistic and philosophical traditions and the Essay, William Warburton is more of a prophylactic. It is in itself evidence of the scope of the Essay’s meaning that it could be so closely associated with two such different figures as Bolingbroke and Warburton, and, after everything that has been seen to connect the Essay to Bolingbroke, that Pope could say to Warburton, “I did not explain my own meaning so well as you” (Corr. IV,171). Warburton, in Samuel Johnson’s reckoning, wanted to save the Essay from accusations of fatalism and deism.105 He did so by insisting that Pope presents God and nature as distinct, and God’s intellect guiding nature. Warburton’s defense of the poem from accusations of deism and Spinozism are intertwined. His Commentary and Vindication are responses to the readings of the Essay promulgated by J.-P. de Crousaz in two texts, Examen de l’essai de monsieur Pope sur l’homme (1737, translated by Elizabeth Carter in 1739) and Commentaire sur la traduction en vers de M. Abbé Du Resnel, de l’Essai de M. Pope sur l’homme (1738, translated by Samuel Johnson in 1739).106 104 Voltaire, Letters, p. 138; see also Lettres, II,215. 105 Samuel Johnson, “Pope,” in �e Lives of the Poets, ed. by Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), IV,41. 106 Connell, Secular Chains, pp. 232–33, regards the attacks on Pope in the later 1730s as a politically motivated response to his hints at anticlericalism. Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life, pp. 743–44, and Donald W. Nichol, Pope’s Literary Legacy: �e Book-Trade Correspondence of William Warburton and John Knapton with Other Letters and Documents 1744–1780, Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications New Series, 23 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1992), xxix–xxx, both note that Warburton had earlier collaborated with Lewis Theobald on his edition of

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The charge of Spinozism was that of identifying the created universe and its creator as one substance. It is a charge Crousaz levels at Pope, often on account of lines in Du Resnel that have no direct equivalent in the original, as at I.173–88 the lines “De leurs corps différens l’admirable structure / Annonce la bonté de la sage nature” (“The admirable structure of their different bodies / Declares the goodness of wise nature”).107 This is Spinozism, according to Crousaz: “by the word nature, is evidently imply’d the Author of nature, by a figure much in use. All the metaphysics of Spinosa are employed in confounding these two terms.”108 Warburton thinks it legitimate for a mere theist to say that nature is the body of God (as Pope might, and, as is clear from his letter to Caryll of 8 March 1732/33, thought he might be understood to have said at I.267–68), but doubts that Spinoza would separate God’s mind from the creation and say the former directed the latter, and doubts Pope would “say there is but one universal Substance in the Universe, and that blind too” (Warburton, p. 47). Warburton defends Pope from the same accusation by citing III.229–30, which describe the emergence of faith from the channels of paternalistic reverence and tradition: “The worker from the work distinct was known, / And simple Reason never sought but one.” The poem according to Warburton presents a world of divine direction, not atomic chance; a world that is right from God’s point of view, not man’s (Warburton, pp. 22, 27–28). The charge of fatalism that Crousaz levels is based on Pope’s apparent admission of God as the source of moral evils. (Leibniz’s thought on this topic was related to Epistle I above.) Crousaz wants to know what kind of submission Pope recommends: “if the submission, so strongly recommended as the sure way to everlasting happiness, consists in looking undisturb’d and careless upon every thing that passes, in an indolent and supine unconcern about our actions and those of others, it is a fatal calm, an ill-grounded security that tends to the total overthrow of morality and religion” (pp. 115–16). Shakespeare, which was deeply antagonistic to the edition Pope had just published, and that Warburton had made negative comments about Pope. 107 Les Principes de la morale et du goût en deux poëmes, trans. by Jean-François Du Resnel du Bellay (Paris, 1737), I.261–62, p. 74. 108 Samuel Johnson, A Commentary, p. 92. Further accusations that Pope confounds, as Crousaz thinks Spinoza does, the substance of God and nature, pp. 109–10.

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Further on this is called “that fatal unconcern, that destructive security, by which souls are betray’d to eternal ruin, by relaxing that vigilance, with which we ought to inspect our own hearts and actions in order to arrive at a happy immortality” (pp. 191–92).109 Crousaz is concerned that Pope has demoted reason from its position as the scrutineer of human actions, and encouraged people unreflectively to give in to their passions, because he has described the universe as a closed system of mutual dependency in which all human actions must be the necessary result of some other cause, rather than the products of free (and fallen) choice: if there be a mutual influence and dependence between the different parts of the universe, if a man be only moved in consequence of some operation of external agents, if no single part acts or suffers any thing but what contributes to the advantage of the whole, every man who interests himself in the general good must, at the close of every day, however spent, review all his actions with satisfaction, because he has done nothing which has not promoted the general interest of the universe, or which the perfection of the whole, or the connection of its parts, did not make necessary. (p. 242) Crousaz remarks that the suasive element of Pope’s poem is rendered pointless in such a fatalistic universe: what looks like the effect of moral exhortation on the part of the poet turns out to be the effect of a concatenation of mechanical causes.110 Johnson, in a footnote commenting on Crousaz’s treatment of Pope’s thinking on the ruling passion, attempts to save Pope from the accusation of fatalism by noting that the ruling passion expresses itself by turning people toward certain ends, by means of the allied virtues and vices. Individuals choose, however, whether their passion will take a virtuous or vicious form (p. 166n). But in his “Life” of Pope, he is not so convinced, reporting that Crousaz “was persuaded that the positions of Pope, as they terminated for the most part in natural religion, were intended to draw mankind away from revela109 Similar concerns are also expressed in the Examination, pp. 27–28. 110 Crousaz, Examination, pp. 166–67.

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tion, and to represent the whole course of things as a necessary concatenation of indissoluble fatality; and it is undeniable, that in many passages a religious eye may easily discover expressions not very favourable to morals, or to liberty.”111 Pope himself, even before the publication of Crousaz’s attacks, was aware of the possibility of reading the Essay as an endorsement of fatalism. He writes to Ralph Allen on 8 September 1736 including the text of “The Universal Prayer,” written around 1715 and now revised to be “a Comment on some Verses in my Essay on Man, which have been mis-construed,” so that the third stanza “reconciles Freedom & Necessity.” The stanza says that God enabled people to tell good from ill, “And, binding Nature fast in Fate,  / Left’st Conscience free, and Will” (Corr. IV,31–32). Warburton’s efforts are to save Pope from one possible implication of the perception of the universe as a closed system—resignation of responsibility for freely willed actions. In saving Pope, Warburton does not see that the very tension between, on the one hand, a limited human comprehension of the system of the world and, on the other, a presumed perfect divine order is what produces the ethical and poetic excitement of the poem.

Reception: European Philosophy in the 1750s and Beyond The Essay was a profoundly influential poetic text. Many verse essays were published in its wake, with one of them bearing Pope’s revisions to its text, and appearing in some sense to carry on the work of the Essay. Walter Harte’s Essay on Reason was seen to the press after assistance from Pope, who, writing to David Mallet, May/June 1734, suggested that the Title of an Essay on Reason is the best, & [I] am half of opinion, if no Name be set to it, the public will think it mine especially since in the Index, (annext to the large paper Edition of the Essay on Man) the Subject of the next Epistle is mentioned to be of Human Reason &c. But whether this may be an Inducement, or the Contrary, to Mr Harte, I know not: I like his poem so well 111 “Pope,” Lives of the Poets, IV,40.

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(especially since his last alterations) that it would no way displease me. (Corr., III,408–9) Pope hoped that the poem would “reflect favourably on the piety and orthodoxy of An Essay on Man.” This piety and orthodoxy consisted in assigning central roles to reason and revelation in determining the human position in the scheme of things, again suggesting that Pope was sensitive to the case brought against the poem.112 While poetic responses to the Essay were numerous, it is the use of the poem by major philosophical figures of the later eighteenth-century on which I focus in the following pages. I shall not be suggesting that they derive substantive arguments directly from Pope, but that his poem comes to mind, and is taken one way or another, in the course of arguments that are central to these Enlightenment thinkers. I concentrate on the poem’s reception in European philosophy of the 1750s. The appropriate disposal of sensory and intellectual powers to different creatures concerns both Condillac and Hume, to very different ends. Pope says that nature, “without profusion kind” assigned “The proper organs” and “proper pow’rs” to different ranks of being, including people (I.179–80). Condillac defines reason as “our knowledge of the manner in which we must govern the operations of the soul.”113 Reason is the gift of nature that distinguishes humans from animals, and if we were to complain about its inadequacies, we may as well “reproach nature for having given us a mouth, arms, and other organs.” It should be realized, however, that reason is adequate to its task of controlling the operations of the mind because God is perfectly parsimonious in his disposition: “We will acknowledge that as much reason has become our lot as our condition required, and that if the one from whom we have everything we are is frugal with his favors, he knows how to dispense them wisely.” Echoes of Pope can be heard here, as when man is told it is as sensible to ask why he 112 McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning, pp. 107, 127. See also Leranbaum, Alexander Pope’s ‘Opus Magnum’, pp. 25–26. 113 Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, ed. and trans. by Hans Aarsleff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 63. Condillac also writes on the opposition of reason and instinct with respect to humans and animals in his Traité des animaux, ed. by Michel Malherbe (Paris: Vrin, 2004), pp. 163–69.

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has not been made less, as more (I.35–38). “Man’s as perfect as he ought” (I.70). Condillac indeed goes on to cite Pope critically for raising instinct over reason, something Condillac thinks he does because he fails to see that while reason, madness, and instinct are all ways of managing the operations of the mind, reason is the correct method for humans: If Pope had known how to get clear ideas of these things, he would not have inveighed so strongly against reason, let alone concluded: In vain you praise the excellence of Reason. Should it have preference over Instinct? How can those two faculties compare! God directs Instinct, Man the Reason.114 The citation here is of III.97–98. So Condillac reproves Pope for having realized that the disposition of all physical and mental powers is perfectly just, and nonetheless elevating instinct above reason. Hume puts the same passages of the Essay to a rather different use in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Hume’s Philo takes exception to the bold assumption, on the basis of a contingent universe, of a noncontingent first cause beyond it: an inference from the evidence of a universe of partial evil to a creator of infinite good. Philo is listing circumstances that cause human misery (and so prevent one’s inferring a perfect deity from an imperfect creation) and notes that animal faculties are supplied with frugality—animals and people only just have the senses and abilities they require to stay alive, and no more. Hume adopts precisely the opposite view of divine creative parsimony: it is a reason not to infer a perfect creator. The terms recall Pope. Where Philo notes that “Animals which excel in swiftness are commonly defective in force,” Pope has it that “Each seem114 Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, p. 64. He is using Du Resnal's translation, which has at III.121–24, p. 107: “En vain de la raison tu vantes l’excellence; / Doit-elle sur l’instinct avoir la préférence, / Entre ces facultés quelle comparaison? / Dieu dirige l’instinct, & l’homme la raison.” See also p. 39 for a criticism of the opposition of instinct and reason.

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ing want [is] compensated of course, / Here with degrees of swiftness, there of force” (I.181–82). Desiring that people should have been given a greater inclination to labor, Philo anticipates being “told, that we impiously pretend to break the order of Nature; that we want to exalt ourselves into a higher rank of being; that the presents which we require, not being suitable to our state and condition, would only be pernicious to us.” He is not satisfied with the assertion that “in the scale of reas’ning life, ’tis plain / There must be, somewhere, such a rank as Man; / And all the question (wrangle e’er so long) / Is only this, if God has plac’d him wrong?” (I.47–50). Hume provides an answer to the question “Who finds not Providence all good and wise, / Alike in what it gives, and what denies?” (I.205–6). The answer is “Philo.”115 As eighteenth-century writers on rhetoric illustrated their arguments for one kind or another of poetic speech, they often drew on Pope’s Essay. So Adam Smith, according to the student notes that are the only form in which his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres are preserved, thought the most beautiful passages in the Essay were those in which there was no discernible figurative language, “those in which he describes the state of mind of an untaught Indian; and the other in which he considers the various ranks and orders of beings in the universe,” citing I.99ff. and I.233ff.116 J. V. Price has suggested that the Essay was approached as a rhetorical rather than philosophical text in the Scottish Enlightenment, that its philosophy was little recognized.117 I argue here that Smith turns to ideas and images from the Essay in the development of central concepts. The Essay is not merely a rhetorical resource for Smith; it also plays a role in his attempt to reconcile the production of social goods with the pursuit of individual interests.118 Smith seems in some ways 115 David Hume, �e Natural History of Religion and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. by A. Wayne Colver and John Vladimir Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 236–39. 116 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. by J. C. Bryce (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1983), VII, pp. 33–34. 117 John Vladimir Price, “Pope and the Scottish Enlightenment Universities,” in Alexander Pope: Essays for the Tercentenary, ed. by Colin Nicholson (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), pp. 39–52 (pp. 43, 50). 118 This reconciliation is often referred to as “the invisible hand,” defined by

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less reconciled to the perspectival challenge people face given their position in the creation, their sense that they inhabit a systematic universe of which many of the operations are mysterious to them. The Stoics are berated for imagining such an equalizing providential scheme that no particular action is more worthy than another, that lifting a finger and laying down one’s life for one’s country are equally part of the scheme. Smith thinks otherwise, that passions have been given us to interest us more really in “that little department in which we ourselves have some little management and direction, which immediately affect ourselves, our friends, our country.”119 The ethical mechanism of the impartial spectator in the breast, the idée fixe of Smith’s �eory of Moral Sentiments, is that which will rein in the passions (not reason or generalized benevolence, for example). As Smith builds to this point, he cites the Essay (I.90) as a way of demonstrating the difference between God’s perspective and ours: “to the great Superintendant of the universe, all the different events which the course of his providence may bring forth, what to us appear the smallest and the greatest, the bursting of a bubble, as Mr. Pope says, and that of a world, for example, were perfectly equal” (pp. 289–90). The Stoic resigns in the face of providence, and imagines that whatever comes to pass “was the very event which he himself, had he known all the connections and dependencies of things, would [ . . . ] have wished for” (p. 290). Perhaps Smith still has the Essay in mind, where it is asked, But of this frame the bearings, and the ties, The strong connections, nice dependencies, Gradations just, has thy pervading soul Look’d thro’? Or can a part contain the whole?

(I.29–32)

Craig Smith, Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy: �e Invisible Hand and Spontaneous Order (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 14, as that “social mechanism, itself the product of evolution, which acts to produce socially beneficial outcomes from the interaction of actors pursuing their own purposes and operating under conditions of unintended consequences.” 119 Adam Smith, �e �eory of Moral Sentiments, ed. by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982), p. 292.

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The Stoic’s resignation might amount to the same thing as the hubris of trying to think or know beyond mankind, a false assumption that one can discount one’s own position(ality) when making decisions about how to act in what one sees to be a great scheme. Rising above an active or even a spectatorial position might make one capable of producing a moral theory, but it may also destroy one’s capacity as a moral agent.120 The dilemma Smith is left with relates to Pope. The chapter just cited (“Of the order in which Societies are by nature recommended to our Beneficence”) is followed by one “Of universal Benevolence” in which the seeming limit of our concerns is expanded, and in which echoes of the Essay are to be heard (through the filter of Philocles’s rhapsody in �e Moralists cited above): Though our effectual good offices can very seldom be extended to any wider society than that of our own country; our good-will is circumscribed by no boundary, but may embrace the immensity of the universe. [ . . . ] This universal benevolence, how noble and generous soever, can be the source of no solid happiness to any man who is not thoroughly convinced that all the inhabitants of the universe, the meanest as well as the greatest, are under the immediate care and protection of that great benevolent, and allwise Being [ . . . ] The wise and virtuous man [ . . . ] should [ . . . ] be [ . . . ] willing that all those inferior interests [private, professional, state] should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the universe, to the interest of that great society of all sensible and intelligent beings, of which God himself is the immediate administrator and director. If he is deeply impressed with the habitual and thorough conviction that this benevolent and allwise Being can admit into the system of his government, no partial evil which is not necessary for the universal good, he must consider all the misfortunes which may befal himself, his friends, his society, or his country, as necessary for the prosperity of the universe, and therefore as what he ought, not only to submit to with resignation, but as what he himself, if he had known all the 120 See Charles L. Griswold Jr., Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 146, 347.

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connexions and dependencies of things, ought sincerely and devoutly to have wished for. (pp. 235–66) That same echo of connection and dependency, combined with the recall of partial evil as universal good (I.292 and IV.114), makes it clear that for Smith the problem is the same as for Pope, and as intractable: for how are we to know when our passions are telling us to do something that nature and prejudice and history have dictated, and to remain stubborn in them, even if there is perceptible damage to another? And when are we to recognize that our interests are to be sacrificed to a higher order of human or divine government? By what rule inferable from our perception of the orderliness of the world do we determine the appropriate quantity and quality of sacrifice we are to make of our interests to those of the world system? That following nature demands self-discipline may be one of those moral paradoxes from which there is no escape. That is no help, however, in determining specific limits to self-gratification or self-sacrifice on specific occasions. The Berlin Academy had set as the topic for its annual essay prize in 1755 (the topic would have been announced in 1753) an assessment of Pope’s system of optimism, as they called it. Such contests led to public debate as well as the submission of entries. The prize topic brought Pope’s relationship to Leibniz back to the fore, quite possibly as a means for the Academicians to attack the presumed Leibnizian origins of Pope’s thought.121 Gotthold Ephraim von Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn prepared a submission for the prize but did not enter it. They argued that philosophical poets did not have a system of any kind, but eclectically presented all their truths in the most forceful argumentative context available, and find in any case significant differences between Leibnizian and Popean thinking: Leibniz finds the coherence of the universe in its concatenation of causes and effects, whereas Pope finds it in a full rank ordering of beings; Leibniz thinks evils are the result of lower-order laws being sacrificed to 121 Avi Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment: �e Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 72; Leo Strauss, Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn, trans. and ed. by Martin D. Yaffe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 1, 11.

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those of a higher order, whereas Pope thinks those evils the result of the application of the universal laws. Lessing and Mendelssohn conjecture that Pope may as well be described as promoting the Shaftesburian system (citing the passage from �e Moralists quoted above), but saying that he misunderstood Shaftesbury. They suggest further that Leibniz might have been influenced by Shaftesbury, and that William King’s De origine mali is a source for Pope.122 Voltaire’s later response to Pope’s poem also concerns Leibniz. In editions of his Lettres philosophiques from 1756 onward, Voltaire concludes the twenty-second letter by praising the poem, and pointing to its probable sources: The Essay on Man of Pope seems to me the most beautiful, most useful, most sublime didactic poem ever written in any language. It is true that the whole groundwork of it is to be found in Lord Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, and I do not know why Mr. Pope gives the honor solely to Lord Bolingbroke, without saying a word about Shaftesbury, the pupil of Locke.123 Given that metaphysics vary little over time and place, Voltaire says, it is unsurprising that Pope resembles Leibniz on the place of human ill and folly in the best of all possible worlds, or Plato on the chain of beings. But one particular historical event reinvigorates discussion of Pope’s moral system. The earthquake that killed much of the population and destroyed much of the architecture of Lisbon on 1 November 1755 made the question of the partial ills necessitated by general laws very palpable for European thinkers. Rousseau writes to Voltaire on 18 August 1756, responding to Voltaire’s poem on the earthquake, particularly on its implied theology: You reproach Pope and Leibniz for insulting our ills by holding that all is good, and you so crowd the picture of our misery that 122 Lessing and Mendelssohn, “Pope ein Metaphysiker!” pp. 305, 317, 320, 332, 335–37. See also Benjamin W. Redekop, Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), pp. 86–87. 123 Letters, p. 147; Lettres, II,139.

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you aggravate our sense of it: in place of the consolation for which I’d hoped you do nothing but afflict me; [ . . . ] Pope’s poem alleviates my ills and brings me to patience, yours sharpens my pains, excites me to complaint and leaving me nothing but a shaken hope, it reduces me to despair. ‘Man, be patient,’ Pope and Leibniz tell me, ‘your ills are a necessary effect of your nature and the constitution of the universe. The eternal and beneficent being who governs it wanted to protect you from them: of all possible economies he chose that which brought together the least ill and the most good, or to say the same thing still more plainly, if it is necessary, if he didn’t do better it’s because he couldn’t do better.124 Rousseau makes the point that the Pope-Leibniz view he prefers does not necessitate blaming God for natural evils. Even things like earthquakes, when they strike us as disasters, are caused by human actions: people choose to live in Lisbon, in close proximity to one another, in high stone houses. Those choices are as much the cause of their death as the earthquake. Rousseau supposes a world that is entirely open to causal explanation, though some of the causes may be hidden from the human perspective (now, or permanently). “All events seem to me to have some necessary effect, moral or physical, or combining the two, but which we don’t always perceive because the genealogy of events is even more difficult to follow than that of 124 Correspondence and Related Documents XVII, January 1756–March 1757, Letters D6664–D7222, ed. by Theodore Besterman, The Complete Works of Voltaire 101 (Banbury, Oxfordshire: The Voltaire Foundation, 1971), letter D6973, pp. 280–92 (pp. 280–81): “Vous reprochez à Pope et à Leibniz d’insulter à nos maux en soutenant que tout est bien, et vous chargés tellement le Tableau de nos miséres que vous en aggravez le sentiment: Au lieu des consolations que j’espérois, vous ne faites que m’affliger; [ . . . ] Le Poëme de Pope adoucit mes maux et me porte à la patience, le vôtre aigrit mes peines, m’excite au murmure, et m’ôtant tous hors une espérance ébranlée, il me réduit au désespoir. [ . . . ] ‘Homme, prend patience’ me disent Pope et Leibniz, ‘tes maux sont un effet nécessaire de ta nature et de la constitution de cet univers. L’Etre éternel et bienfaisant qui le gouverne eût voulu t’en garantir: de toutes les Economies possibles il a choisi celle qui réunissoit le moins de mal et le plus de bien, ou pour dire la même chose encore plus cruement s’il le faut, s’il n’a pas mieux fait c’est qu’il ne pouvoit mieux faire.[’]”

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human kind.”125 The goodness of the whole system is evident only if one imagines a further, higher perspective than the human. Rousseau suggests amending Pope’s (or rather Du Resnel’s) “all is good”: “the addition of an article would it seems make the more exact proposition, and in place of all is good it might be better to say, the whole is good, or, all is good for the whole.” In passages that recall Pope’s preference for a life being in the right over correct dogma, and on the great social value of religion, Rousseau concludes his letter by suggesting that Voltaire draft a document that would list the minimal maxims for a social covenant, combined with a set of fanatical maxims that it would be proscribed for anyone to hold—“not as impious but as seditious.”126 Rousseau refers to this letter in his Confessions, saying that Voltaire wrote only a line or two in response, saying he was ill, but that Voltaire’s true response was Candide, a text Rousseau has not read (p. 294n). The two philosophes trade views on the interrelation of human perception, human good, and human obligation, with the Essay as a medium. The correspondences between Immanuel Kant’s Universal Natural History and �eory of the Heavens (1755) and the Essay were noted by A. O. Lovejoy in 1936, and by Maynard Mack (TE III.i, xli), but without any supporting detail.127 Kant’s text uses epigraphs from Pope in the Brockes translation for each of its three sections (corresponding to I.32–34, III.9–14, and I.23–28, respectively).128 These three epigraphs suggest the topics from Pope’s poem with which 125 Ibid., p. 285: “Tout événmt me semble avoir nécessairement quelque effet, ou moral, ou physique, ou composé des deux, mais qu’on n’apperçoit pas toujours, par ce que la filiation des événemens est encore plus difficile à suivre que celle des hommes.” 126 Ibid., pp. 287, 291: “l’addition d’un article rendroit ce semble la proposition plus exacte et au lieu de tout est bien il vaudroit peut-être mieux dire, le tout est bien, ou, tout est bien pour le tout”; “non comme impies, mais comme séditieuses.” 127 Kant’s notes toward an entry for the Prussian Royal Academy’s essay prize of 1755 on Pope’s system are also discussed by Nuttal, Pope’s Essay on Man, pp. 191–92. James Noggle, �e Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 122–27, understands the oscillation between what can and cannot be known in Pope and Kant in relation to the sublime. 128 Versuch vom Menschen des Herrn Alexander Pope, Esq, nebst verschiedenen andern Übersetzungen und einigen eigenen Gedichten, trans. by Berthold Heinrich Brockes (Hamburg, 1740).

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Kant was thinking: the chain of being; the attraction of all matter; the medial position of humans, and their capacity to infer the systematic nature of the universe without being able to comprehend the extent or limits of the system. There are other citations and echoes of the Essay. I.87–90 are cited in support of the view that transitoriness is compatible with plenitude: “if a world-system exhausts in the long course of its duration all variety which its arrangement can hold, if it now has become a superfluous member in the chain of being, then nothing is more befitting than that in the theater of the ongoing changes of the universe that [factor should] play the last role which taxes each finite being, namely, that each should bring its levy to transitoriness.”129 When talking of how little humans have developed the seemingly higher faculties given them by nature, Kant echoes the description of the man motivated by neither reason nor passion (“Fix’d like a plant on his peculiar spot, / To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot,” II.63–64) very strongly: “When we consider the lives of most men, this creature seems to have been created to absorb fluids, as does a plant, and to grow, to propagate his species, and finally to age and die” (p. 187). Kant supports his claim that proximity to the sun produces greater perfection of intelligent beings by citing II.30– 34 (p. 190). In addition to these local echoes I wish to suggest larger argumentative relations between the texts. Stanley L. Jaki has warned of the hollowness of Kant’s claim “of being the Newton of the physical part of cosmology,” while recognizing that he “was certainly one of the first to propose the correct idea of the Milky Way, and the very first to claim that nebulous stars or nebulae are so many stellar systems similar to our own galaxy.”130 It is not the case that Pope’s poem was of great help in elaborating the technical aspects of Kant’s treatise on the planets. But it is tempting to say that Pope’s images of system piled on system might have stimulated Kant’s imagination. The poem (as I have depicted it in this introduction) confronts a question very similar to that which Kant sets himself in his text, attempting to reconcile the mechanistic 129 Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and �eory of the Heavens, trans. by Stanley L. Jaki (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), p. 158. Further references will be given parenthetically in the main text. 130 Jaki, “Introduction,” pp. 28, 69.

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and the providential universe: “Matter, which operates according to its most universal laws, brings forth through its natural disposition, or if one is to call it such, through a blind mechanism appropriate results which appear to be the design of a highest Wisdom” (p. 81). If Kant took seriously Pope’s instruction to “Observe how system into system runs” (I.25), we may regard the poem as contributing to his insight about the Milky Way as an independent star system. Kant’s reflections on this possibility are certainly Popean in tone: If the greatness of a planetary world-edifice, in which the earth as a grain of sand is hardly noticed, moves the intellect into admiration, with what astonishment will one be enchanted if one considers the infinite amount of worlds and systems which fill the totality of the Milky Way; but how this astonishment increases when one realizes that all these immeasurable star-orders again form the unit of a number whose end we do not know and which perhaps just as the former is inconceivably great and yet again is only the unit of a new number system. We see the first members of a progressive relation of worlds and systems, and the first part of this infinite progression makes already known what one must conjecture about the whole. There is no end here but an abyss of a true immeasurability in which all ability of human concepts sinks even when it is elevated by the help of the science of numbers. The Wisdom, the Goodness, the Power, which reveals itself, is infinite and is fruitful and operative in the same measure; the plan of its revelation must therefore, just as it is, be infinite without limits. Kant here is close to Pope, who argues that we know only what concerns the human system, but that our middle nature determines and obliges us to conjecture outward from that system to a greater and divinely governed universe in which all discord is harmony. Furthermore, at the close of the passage Kant’s thinking runs close to his elaboration of the concept of the mathematical sublime in the Critique of Judgement (1790). In that later text, Kant points out that all claims to magnitude based on sense are relative; but that we nonetheless make claims about magnitude with reference to an absolute realm. This absolute realm is the realm of reason that transcends any sensory experience. To experience the mathematically sublime is

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to experience mingled pleasure and pain; pain at the insufficiency of our sensory apparatus for conceiving extremes of magnitude, and pleasure at the conformity of our nature to a rule of reason that determines absolutes: the inner perception of the inadequacy of every standard of sense to serve for the rational estimation of magnitude is a coming into accord with reason’s laws, and a displeasure that makes us alive to the feeling of the supersensible side of our being, according to which it is final, and consequently a pleasure, to find every standard of sensibility falling short of the ideas of reason.131 The Milky Way is an object that excites this rational idea of absolute magnitude in the face of the incapacity of the senses to conceive of the magnitudes concerned. In being this kind of thing the Milky Way is an exemplary purposive natural object as Kant describes them in the Universal Natural History: Nature’s purpose is said to be “[making possible her] contemplation by intelligent beings” (p. 184). The whole point of creation is that it is perceived by intelligent natures as a sign of God’s activity. And the point of such availability to perception seems to be that creatures will realize their essential interconnectedness through their shared origins in the matter that is entirely disposed by God’s providence. It is for this reason that Kant agrees with Pope (I.241–46) that striking any links from the chain of being is deleterious to the whole: “From the highest class of thinking beings to the most abject insect, no member [of that chain] is indifferent to nature; and nothing can be missing [from it] without breaking up the beauty of the whole, which consists in interconnectedness” (p. 185). Perceiving the beauty of an interconnected whole is the issue for Kant. Toward the close of his text Kant returns to the problematic of reconciling materialism with providence: how would now one reconcile with the doctrine of purposiveness a mechanistic doctrine, so that what the highest Wisdom itself 131 Immanuel Kant, �e Critique of Judgement, trans. by James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952, repr. 1980), pp. 94–98, and quotation from p. 106.

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planned is entrusted to raw matter, and the rule of providence to a nature left to herself for its execution? [ . . . ] The better one learns to know nature, the better will one realize that the general properties of things are not alien to and separate from one another. One will be sufficiently convinced that they have essential affinities through which they are by themselves in harmony and support one another in achieving more perfect dispositions, [namely,] the mutual influence of elements for the beauty of the material and even for the advantage of the spiritual world, and that in general the single natures of things already in the realm of eternal truths form, so to speak, within themselves a system in which one is related to the other; one will also forthwith recognize that the affinity is proper to them through the community of origin out of which they have together their essential properties created. (pp. 193–94) A citation of Essay on Man I.236–41 is produced to justify the claim, but one might as well think of the close system of benevolence the invocation of which brings the poem to an end (IV.358). It might not be unreasonable to suggest that Pope’s Essay was one of the tools Kant used in formulating his problematic of the comprehensibility of absolute rational truths that transcend the limits of what humans know of their world through sense, and that he did so through applying Pope’s ideas of interrelated systems to the technicalities (and fantasies) of cosmogony. The Essay also has relevance for the tradition of philosophical anthropology to which Kant is vital. I will draw this introduction to a close by characterizing the connection between a twentieth-century text in that tradition, Ernst Cassirer’s An Essay on Man, and its namesake. Cassirer elsewhere suggests that he finds in Pope the Enlightenment encouragement to return from boundless speculation to human science: “Time and again thought returns to its point of departure from its various journeys of exploration intended to broaden the horizon of objective reality. Pope gave brief and pregnant expression to this deep-seated feeling of the age in the line: ‘The proper study of mankind is man.’ ”132 Cassirer’s contention is that a true 132 �e Philosophy of the Enlightenment, cited in Donald Phillip Verene, �e Ori-

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modern philosophical anthropology, one that does justice to the full range of human behavior and affect without crude reductions, must concentrate on humans as symbol-using animals. Use of symbols characterizes all aspects of human activity and unifies them: “In language, in religion, in art, in science, man can do no more than to build up his own universe—a symbolic universe that enables him to understand and interpret, to articulate and organize, to synthesize and universalize his human experience.”133 The symbolic universe humans inhabit is one in which there are potentialities as well as actualities (p. 62). To inhabit a world in which there are potential events, behaviors, attitudes, is to inhabit a world in which one can adopt different perspectives. Cassirer focuses on the perspectives offered by the largest trends in human cultural activity (myth and religion, language, art, science): “It is characteristic of the nature of man that he is not limited to one specific and single approach to reality but can choose his point of view and so pass from one aspect of things to another” (p. 188). Attitudes succeed one another; the universe may appear to us now under one, now under another aspect: that is the characteristic of being human. The unification of human symbolic activity is in its tendency toward a higher perspective (to adopt Cassirer’s implicit and sometimes explicit spatialization). There are higher forms of myth, religion, and language (pp. 119, 151). Increasing the height of one’s perspective is freeing oneself from restrictions, and at the same time entering into new (higher) obligations (freedom from taboos brings new ethical obligations; freedom from geocentrism brings new obligations of astronomical accuracy). Cassirer conceives of the shifting and shedding of perspectives, the tendency toward higher perspectives, as a kind of human liberation: Human culture taken as a whole may be described as the process of man’s progressive self-liberation. Language, art, religion, scigins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), p. 89. 133 Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (Toronto: Bantam, 1970; first publ. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944), p. 244. Further references to this edition are given parenthetically in the main text.

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tom jones ence, are various phases in this process. In all of them man discovers and proves a new power—the power to build up a world of his own, an “ideal” world. Philosophy cannot give up its search for a fundamental unity in this ideal world. But it does not confound the unity with simplicity. It does not overlook the tensions and frictions, the strong contrasts and deep conflicts between the various powers of man. [ . . . ] But this multiplicity and disparateness does not denote discord or disharmony. All these functions complete and complement one another. Each one opens a new horizon and shows us a new aspect of humanity. The dissonant is in harmony with itself; the contraries are not mutually exclusive, but interdependent: ‘harmony in contrariety, as in the case of the bow and the lyre.’ (p. 252)

Humans are the kind of animals for whom different perspectives on their universe, though seeming to be irreconcilable, are always tending toward a higher reconciliation that provides more freedom. The shift of perspectives native to human life is an example of the human soul rising (IV.361–62), not necessarily from individual to whole, but from lower to higher orders of comprehension. Cassirer’s philosophical anthropology has a normative as well as a descriptive aspect: describing humans in a certain way is an encouragement to act in certain ways.134 Some loose genealogical relationship between Cassirer’s and Pope’s Essays is asserted in their titles; it is present too in the understanding of perspectivalism as inherent in conceptions of the human place in the universe. Yet for both it is a perspectivalism that allows, even encourages one to develop a hierarchy of perspectives, and to encourage others, through a philosophical essay—that blend of expository and exhortatory writing—to move to the highest available perspective. Both Pope and Cassirer acknowledge the limitations of a distinctively human sensory and phenomenal world. If there is any possibility of transcending that world in Pope, it is through faith that the great system revealed in part to humans is operating for the greatest good; for Cassirer the transcendence comes through the evolution of ever more sophisticated sym134 Verene, �e Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, p. 90.

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bolic means of structuring the human world, producing ever greater freedom, and ever higher obligations.135 The human mind may be finite, when related to an intuited infinite divine mind, but that limitation never precludes striving for ever fuller and more coherent experiences of the human world.136 The universe as ontic, as a form, as a set of preestablished hierarchies between which various forms of love are expressed, is not absent from Pope’s poem, no matter how present the picture of mutual goods emerging from mutual service might be (see above, “Order”). When Charles Taylor asserts the demise of nature as order in Pope, he goes too far. He suggests that for Pope the passions are a means to “encounter nature paradigmatically and centrally, not in a vision of order, but in experiencing the right inner impulse” (p. 284). The vision of a hierarchical order united by love, and the vision of a world of benevolently interlocking needs and gratifications, are not exclusive in the universe of An Essay on Man; indeed, their interrelation in the argument of the poem, from Epistle I to Epistle IV, and in its local vacillations between the providential and the provisional world, is its characteristic feature. In the Essay on Man there is always an obligation to act on what we can (and what we cannot) know of ourselves. There is a challenge and an obligation in the human position, a challenge to be higher, yet without wanting to be more than human.137 The poem does not (as Crousaz accused it of doing), encourage its readers to resign. The resignation and submission it encourages are those of humble pursuit of the highest possible human perspective. Pope can be claimed for a modernity, but it is not a mo135 Cassirer’s text, written in 1944, has been criticized for its refusal to engage with political circumstances through any means other than the cultural and educational. See Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: �e Last Philosopher of Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 213. 136 See Peter E. Gordon, “Neo-Kantianism and the Politics of Enlightenment,” Philosophical Forum 39:2 (Summer 2008): 223–28 (p. 232). 137 Srigley, �e Mighty Maze, p. 151, notes that a progressive motion in the reincarnation of spirits enables a slightly different reading of whatever is being right: “From being a formula endorsing the perpetual imperfection of the human condition in the name of a balance of opposites, it became descriptive of the rightness of each moment in history in man’s search for right relationship with himself and with his fellow human beings.”

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dernity in which universal order has gone fugitive, to be replaced by evanescent and private epiphanies. It is a modernity in which the good promised by intuiting how a world system (that is always beyond our full comprehension) works is still a real good to which we might aspire.

Above, and on the following pages: Pages from a 1736 copy of An Essay on Man, annotated by Pope. © The British Library Board, C.122.e.31, pp. 20– 23.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

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his is not a critical edition of the Essay. The principle of the edition is to offer the fullest version of Pope’s text and notes, as they are found in the various printed editions of his lifetime, with some reference to the surviving manuscripts. In preparing the text I spot-checked Maynard Mack’s collation for TE III.i, and found no errors. I therefore refer readers requiring a collation to Mack. The following text is based on the edition Mack calls 1743b, also his copytext, using An Essay on Man. Being the First Book of Ethic Epistles. To H. St. John. L. Bolingbroke. With the Commentary and Notes of Mr. Warburton (London: J. and P. Knapton, 1743), Foxon P865, British Library C.59.e1. This edition lacks an argument for Epistle I, which is here supplied from TE III.i. Warburton’s notes and commentary that occupy the bas page of 1743b are omitted. I have recorded substantial additions to and deletions from earlier texts made in 1743b in footnotes, using and acknowledging Mack’s collation. I have also added footnote references to earlier versions of lines or passages where I feel there may be some significance in the earlier version or to the revision. In doing so I have used Mack’s collation for references to the individually published verse Epistles II and III, identifying them as 1733, and the following collected editions of the poem (particularly for capitalization and italicization, which are not recorded in the collation): An Essay on Man, Being the First Book of Ethic Epistles. To Henry St. John, L. Bolingbroke (London: John Wright for Lawton Gilliver, 1734), Foxon P852, British Library 1486.d.3 (Mack’s 1734a); �e Works of Alexander Pope, Esq, vol. II, 3rd ed. (London: Lawton Gilliver, 1736), Griffith 430 (see Foxon, p. 222), British Library C.122.e.31. This copy of vol. II of the 1736 Works was annotated by Pope with corrections for the press, and four pages from it are reproduced photographically in the current volume. None of these corrections were carried into later editions, and I make reference to them at several points. Pope’s own footnotes to the Essay, which were not included in 1743b, have been preserved in the form given in the 1736 text just recxvii

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ferred to, with additions on two occasions (I.208, III.283) from �e Works of Alexander Pope, Esq, vol. II (London: R. Dodsley for T. Cooper, 1739), Griffith 505. I include one set of notes omitted by Mack, the “Variations” recording some differences between published texts. These are found at the end of vol. II of �e Works of Mr. Alexander Pope (London: J. Wright for Lawton Gilliver, 1735), in which the Essay on Man has its own title page indicating that it is the previous year’s collected edition of the four epistles. I have not reproduced the “Variations” that Warburton includes in his editions after Pope’s death: although Warburton’s “Variations” refer to one or more manuscript source, I have preferred to make my own references in footnotes to the two surviving manuscripts of the poem. The two versions of “To the Reader” (found in some early editions of Epistles I and II), “The Design” (first found in 1734a), and the arguments to each epistle are as Mack gives them. The line numbers provided by Pope in the “Arguments” of 1743b do not tally perfectly with the text. I have adapted the numbering in the “Arguments” so that the line numbers refer to the start of the appropriate section, or, where the section marker is lacking in the copy text, to the most appropriate new sentence or verse paragraph. I have inserted section markers, on the basis of the “Arguments,” at II.231, III.109, IV.19, IV.29, IV.77, IV.111, IV.131, IV.167, and IV.309. I have retained Pope’s practice of repeating double inverted commas (quotation marks) to mark continuing quotation or the report of speech at the beginning of every new line of verse. Some editorial footnotes attempt to provide contextual information on people named in the poem, on contemporary science, and on geography. But the majority of footnotes provide possible analogues, sources, and parallels for Pope’s phrasing or larger argument. Many references in these footnotes were identified by means of searches on JISC Historical Texts. Others come from my reading in what I take to be important texts for Pope. I have only rarely referred to Mack’s notes, which are much more comprehensive than mine, especially with respect to the poem’s classical, theological, and Renaissance heritage. My practice differs from Mack inasmuch as I (almost) always quote the material cited. I have also included Voltaire’s annotations in his copy of the poem, given the emphasis I place, in the introduction, on Voltaire’s response to, and possible influence on, the poem.

AN

E S S A Y on M A N , Or the F I R S T B O O K of

ETHIC EPISTLES, TO

H. ST. JOHN L. BOLINGBROKE.

TO THE READER

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As the Epistolary Way of Writing hath prevailed much of late, we have ventured to publish this Piece composed some Time since, and whose Author chose this Manner, notwithstanding his Subject was high and of dignity, because of its being mixt with Argument, which of its Nature approacheth to Prose. �is, 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 Ethicks are included. As he imitates no Man, so he would be thought to vye with no Man in these Epistles, particularly with the noted Author of Two lately published: 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.

TO THE READER �e Author was induced to publish these Epistles separately for two Reasons, �e One, that he might not impose upon the Publick too much at once of what he thought incorrect; �e other, that by this Method he might profit of its Judgement on the Parts, in order to make the Whole less unworthy.

THE DESIGN 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 first version of “To the Reader” is found in early issues of the first epistle; the second version in late issues of Epistle I and in Epistle II; “The Design” was first included in the first collected edition of the four epistles in 1734 (MM). *

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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 my self 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 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 the perspicuity to ornament, without wandring 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 connection, 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.

EPISTLE I. A RG U M E N T.

Of the Nature and State of Man, with respect to the U N I V E R S E . Of Man in the abstract. — I. �at we can judge only with regard to our own System, being ignorant of the relations of systems and things, Ver. 17, &c. II. �at 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. �at 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. �e pride of aiming at more knowledge, and pretending to more Perfection, the cause of Man’s error and misery. �e 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. �e 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. �e 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. �at 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. �e gradations of sense, instinct, thought, reflection, reason; that Reason alone countervails all the other faculties, Ver. 207. VIII. How much farther 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. �e extravagance, madness, and pride of such a desire, Ver. 259. X. �e consequence of all, the absolute submission due

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to Providence, both as to our present and future state, Ver. 281, &c. to the end. *

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WAKE, my St. John! leave all meaner things To low ambition, and the pride of Kings. Let us (since Life can little more supply Than just to look about us and to die) Expatiate free o’er all this scene of Man; A mighty maze! but not without a plan; A Wild, where weeds and flow’rs promiscuous shoot, †

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P: “Of the Nature and State of Man with respect to the Universe.” 1. Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), the addressee of the epistles, politician, historian, and philosopher. For connections between the Essay and his philosophical works, see introduction. Bolingbroke was a Tory, but reconciled to the balance of powers as established by the Revolution of 1689. He fled England for France in 1715, fearing prosecution for involvement in the Jacobite uprising of that year. His philosophy of history was skeptical, but still emphasized the role of history and historiography in inspiring princes with public spirit. From the late 1720s he was active in opposition to the prime minister, Robert Walpole, partly through essays published in �e Craftsman. In the first two editions of Epistle I the name Lælius appears in place of St. John. Gaius Laelius (c. 235–c. 160 bc) served under P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus. He gives his name to Cicero’s work Laelius, On Friendship (Laelius de amicitia), a text echoed in the Essay. In his edition and translation of Cicero, On Friendship, p. 11, J.G.F. Powell says, “Cicero clearly had great admiration for Scipio and Laelius. He imagined them as the centre of a highly civilised and cultured circle of friends, in which poets and Greek men of learning consorted with Roman aristocrats.” In MLM the name Memmius is used (LGA 206–7). Gaius Memmius is the addressee of Lucretius’s De rerum natura. For connections between the Essay and Lucretius’s extended philosophical poem that proposes atomistic materialism, see introduction, pp. xlv–xlvii. 6. MLM: “A mighty Maze! of Walks without a Plan;” (LGA 206–7); HLM records the revision from “A mighty Maze! of Walks without a Plan;” to “A mighty Maze! but not without a Plan;” (LGA 312–13). The maze is a figure for partial human knowledge in many writers. Dryden, II(1972),110, Religio Laici, line 38, where pagan philosophers, failing to find firm grounds for the true human good “In this wilde Maze their vain Endeavours end.” Addison, Cato, I, p. 8: “Remember what our father oft has told us: / The ways of Heaven are dark and intricate, / Puzzled in mazes, and perplexed with errors, / Our understanding traces them in vain, / Lost and bewildered in the fruitless search; / Nor sees with how much art the windings run, / Nor where the regular confusion ends.” John Auther, “The Weakness of our Faculties, or the Uncertainty and Deficiency of Human Knowledge,” in Divine Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1727), p. 51: “How dark are all Things here below? In Part we see, *

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Or Garden, tempting with forbidden fruit. Together let us beat this ample field, Try what the open, what the covert yield; The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar; Eye Nature’s walks, shoot Folly as it flies, And catch the Manners living as they rise; Laugh where we must, be candid where we can; But vindicate the ways of God to Man. *

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in Part we know; / The Way we wander in’s a Maze, / And all our boasted Knowledge but a Blaze, / The Ignis-fatuus of the Soul.” 8. Voltaire in his copy of Works 1735 notes: “mais, mon cher pope, / si c’est un fruit deffendu, tu ny dois donc pas toucher.” “but, my dear pope, if it is a forbidden fruit, you therefore must not touch it.” 15–16. 1736: “Laugh where we must, be candid where we can, / But vindicate the ways of God to man.” The emphasis indicates that laughter was resisted and candor attempted: it suggests magnanimity. Voltaire in his copy of Works 1735 notes: “il ny a pas la de quoi / rire; et voila trop / d’antitheses.” “there is nothing there to laugh at; so it is too much antithesis.” 6–16. HLM (312–13) has two draft notes at the foot of the page and one at the right margin explaining the position of the exordium. Upper foot: “This Exordium relates to ye Whole Work, not only that part first in general, then in particular. The 6.th ^ 7. th & 8th verses allud [MM inserts “e ”] Design of Providence in ye Whole, treated in this Epistle 2. ye Constitution [MM has “7th to the” but the scored-through text is hard to read] of ye Human Mind, whose PassJoyeions [tear in MS] [interlineated matter struck through] the Temptations of mis-applyd Selflove, & wrong pursuits of Power false Happiness & falss Pleasures.” Lower foot: “Proposition. 6th Verse, alludes to ye Subject of this first Epistle, ye State of M[tear in MS] & hereafter, disposed by Providence, tho to him unknown. 7th verse, to ye Subject of ye Second, ye Passions, their good or evil. 8th verse, to ye Subject of ye 4.th Of mans various pursuits of Happiness or Pleasure. 10th verse. to ye Subjects of ye second ^ Epistle of book ^ ye second, the Characters of Men & Manners. 11. 13.14. & 12.th verse. to ye Subject of of ye first Epistle of ye second book, the Limits of Reason, Learning & Ignorance. 16. verse, to ye Subject wch runs thro ye whole Design, to the justification of ye Methods of Providence.” Right margin (transcribed by MM in TE): “[This] Exordium relates to ye Whole Work. The 6.th 7.th & 8.th Lines allude to ye Subjects of This Book; the General Order and Design of Providence; the Constitution of the human Mind, whose Passi[obliterated text], cultivated, are Virtues, neg[obliterated text], Vices; the Temptations [obliterated text] misapplyd Selflove, & wrong pursuits of Power Pleasure and false Happiness. 10th, 11th, & 12th vs , &c allude to ye subjects of ye following books; the [obliterated text] Characters and capacities of Men; [obliterated text] of Mans Learning and Ignorance, knowledge of Mankind and the Manners *

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alex ander pope 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? Thro’ worlds unnumber’d tho’ the God be known, ’Tis ours to trace him only in our own. He, who thro’ vast immensity can pierce, See worlds on worlds compose one universe, Observe how system into system runs, What other planets circle other suns, *

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[obliterated text] The last Line expresses sums up ye Moral & main Drift of ye Whole [obliterated text]stification of ye Ways of Provi[obliterated text].” 16–17. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. by Christopher Ricks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), I.25–27: “I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justify they ways of God to men. // Say first, for Heav’n hides nothing from thy view[ . . . ].” 17. P: “He can reason only from Things known, and judge only with regard to his own System.” 18. HLM: “What can we reason but from what we know?” (LGA 314–15). The emphasis here may suggest that Pope is making a distinction between what is known and what might merely be the report of the senses, intuition, or conjecture. 22. HLM: “’Tis ours to trace him only in our own” (LGA 314–15). Here the underlining suggests a more pointed contrast to the “Worlds unbounded” of the previous MS line of the couplet, achieved visually rather than in the performance of the line. 23–24. TE notes that P’s MSS drafts make the echo of Lucretius, I.62–79, more obvious. MLM (LGA 208–9) has “He who can all the flaming Limits pierce / Of Worlds on worlds, that form one Universe.” HLM (LGA 314–15) records the changes with strikes through and interlineated text. The MS form of words is closer to Lucretius’s English imitators. An Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus De rerum natura, trans. by John Evelyn (London, 1656), p. 17: “Thus did he with his vigorous wit transpierce / The flaming limits of the Universe.” Rochester, “Against Reason and Mankind,” lines 68–69: “soaring pierce / The flaming limits of the Universe.” Creech in his “Life” reports the view that Lucretius composed the poem in intervals between episodes of mental illness: “Then in a Poetical rapture he could fly with his Epicurus beyond the flaming limits of this World, frame and dissolve Seas and Heavens in an instant, and by some unusual sallys, be the strongest argument of his own opinion,” sig. b1r. The main text at p. 4 applies the same language to Epicurus: “His vigorous and active Mind was hurld  / Beyond the flaming limits of this World  / Into the mighty Space.” John Toland, Clito: A Poem on �e Force of Eloquence (London, 1700), p. 10, is in a similar vein: “Thus quick as Thought I unconfin’d will fly / Thro boundless Space, and vast Eternity; / Nature to me appears in no disguize, / Nor can one Atom scape my prying Eyes.” 26. HLM: “What other Planets and what wait on other Suns” (LGA 314–15). Wol*

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What vary’d being peoples ev’ry star, May tell why Heav’n has made us as we are. But of this frame the bearings, and the ties, The strong connections, nice dependencies, Gradations just, has thy pervading soul Look’d thro’? or can a part contain the whole? Is the great chain, that draws all to agree, And drawn supports, upheld by God, or thee? II. Presumptuous Man! the reason wouldst thou find, Why form’d so weak, so little, and so blind! First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess, Why form’d no weaker, blinder, and no less! Ask of thy mother earth, why oaks are made Taller or stronger than the weeds they shade? Or ask of yonder argent fields above, Why Jove’s Satellites are less than Jove? Of Systems possible, if ’tis confest That wisdom infinite must form the best, Where all must full or not coherent be, *

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laston, p. 80: the stars “are rather so many other suns, with their several regions and sets of planets about them. . . . Every corner, every part of the world is as it were made up of other worlds.” 21–32. Thomson, Summer, 321–33: “Shall little haughty Ignorance pronounce  / His works unwise, of which the smallest part  / Exceeds the narrow vision of her mind? / As if upon a full-proportioned dome, / On swelling columns heaved, the pride of art! / A critic fly, whose feeble ray scarce spreads / An inch around, with blind presumption bold / Should dare to tax the structure of the whole. / And lives the man whose universal eye / Has swept at once the unbounded scheme of things, / Marked by their dependence so and firm accord, / As with unfaltering accent to conclude / That this availeth nought?” 32. Voltaire in his copy of Works 1735 notes: “no. but a part / can cavass the laws of the whole.” 36. P: “He 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 the Creation.” 37. Voltaire in his copy of Works 1735 notes: “ jay dit cela il y a quarante / ans.” “I said that forty years ago.” 42. Voltaire in his copy of Works 1735 notes: “ridiculous. for a satellite / ought to be lesser.” The only known satellites of Jupiter in Pope’s time were those observed by Galileo Galilei in the early seventeenth century. 43–44. For a correspondence to Leibniz, p. 128, see introduction, p. lx. *

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alex ander pope 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; And all the question (wrangle e’er so long) Is only this, if God has plac’d him wrong? Respecting Man, whatever wrong we call, May, must be right, as relative to all. In human works, tho’ labour’d on with pain, A thousand movements scarce one purpose gain; In God’s, one single can its end produce; Yet serves to second too some other use. So Man, who here seems principal alone, Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown, Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal; ’Tis but a part we see, and not a whole. *

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45–46. HLM (LGA 316–17) underlines “full,” “coherent,” and “degree.” See Lucretius, p. 49, for a description of degrees of heat and cool: “These two as bounds the middle warmths controul: / Which rise by just degrees, and make a whole.” See also Creech’s notes to bk. I, p. 9, where he argues the absurdity of Lucretius’s attack on providence: “All things now rise from proper Seeds, and grow by just degrees.” 47. 1733a–43a: “Then, in the Scale of Life and Sence, ’tis plain.” 43–48. For a correspondence to Leibniz, p. 190, see introduction, pp. lx–lxi. 48. Voltaire in his copy of Works 1735 notes: “yes since he exists.” 50. Voltaire in his copy of Works 1735 notes: “no. but why he  / made him so miserable.” 51. Epicteti Enchiridion, Made English in a Poetical Paraphrase, trans. by Ellis Walker (London, 1695), begins, “Respecting Man, things are divided thus: / Some do not, and some do belong to us.” 58. Voltaire in his copy of Works 1735 notes: “no perhaps when / we reason.” 60. Many texts Pope knew well contrasted partial human and total divine knowledge. Montaigne, “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde,” II,332: “What, has God put into our Hands the Keys and most secret Springs of his Providence? Is he oblig’d not to exceed the Limits of our Knowledg? Put the Case, O Man, that thou hast been able here to mark some Footsteps of his Effects: Dost thou therefore think that he has employed all he can, and has crowded all his Forms and Idea’s in this Work? Thou seest nothing but the Order and Revolution of this little Vault, under which thou art lodged, if thou dost see so much: Whereas his Divinity has an infinite Jurisdiction beyond: This Part is nothing in Comparison of the Whole.” Dryden, II(1972),110, Religio Laici, lines 39–41: “How can the less the Greater comprehend? / Or finite Reason reach Infinity? / For what cou’d Fathom GOD were more than He.” Locke, IV.iii.23, p. 554: “The intellectual and sensible World, are in this perfectly alike; That that part, *

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When the proud steed shall know why Man restrains His fiery course, or drives him o’er the plains; When the dull Ox, why now he breaks the clod, Is now a victim, and now Ægypt’s God: Then shall Man’s pride and dulness comprehend His actions’, passions’, being’s, use and end; Why doing, suff’ring, check’d, impell’d; and why This hour a slave, the next a deity. Then say not Man’s imperfect, Heav’n in fault; Say rather, Man’s as perfect as he ought; His knowledge measur’d to his state and place, His time a moment, and a point his space. If to be perfect in a certain sphere, What matter, soon or late, or here or there? The blest to day is as completely so, As who began a thousand years ago.

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which we see of either of them, holds no proportion with what we see not; And whatsoever we can reach with our Eyes, or our Thoughts of either of them, is but a point, almost nothing, in comparison of the rest.” The same passage appears in Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, 2 vols. (London, 1728), “Ignorance.” Thomson, Winter, 1066–67, answers the question of calamitous virtue by noting that what appears evil in the context of one human life is not so after death: “what your bounded view, which only saw / A little part, deemed evil is no more.” See I.283 for the human position as a “point.” 66. MLM: “His Action’s, Passion’s, Being’s, Use and End;” MM neither transcribes the comma nor records the striking through of the possessive “s” of “Being’s” in MLM (LGA 208–9). The MS may record a shift from thinking of being as distinct from action and passion, to thinking of being as action and passion (which also have uses and ends). 69–70. Plotinus, III.2, 9, p. 146: “Man is, therefore, a noble creation, as perfect as the scheme allows; a part, no doubt, in the fabric of the All, he yet holds a lot higher than that of all the other living things of earth.” Voltaire in his copy of Works 1735 notes: “cest la le point de / la question. et / il nest pas traitté.” “that’s the nub of the question. and it is not treated.” 75–76. Pope makes the connection to Lucretius, III.1087–94, in MLM: “Lucretius of death reverst. lib. 3.finè” (LGA 210–11). In that MS the couplet replaces “In the same hand, the same all-plastic Pow’r, / Or As in the natal, in or the Mortal hour.” Creech’s Lucretius, III, p. 101: “For tho thy Life shall numerous ages fill, / The state of Death shall be eternal still. / And he that dies to day, shall be no more, / As long as those that perish’d long before.” Dryden, III(1969),56, lines 318–21, translates the same passage: “When once the Fates have cut the mortal Thred, / The Man as much *

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alex ander pope III. Heav’n from all creatures hides the book of Fate, All but the page prescrib’d, their present state; From brutes what men, from men what spirits know: Or who could suffer Being here below? The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, Had he thy Reason, would he skip and play? Pleas’d to the last, he crops the flow’ry food, And licks the hand just rais’d to shed his blood. Oh blindness to the future! kindly giv’n, That each may fill the circle mark’d by Heav’n; Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish, or a sparrow fall, Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d, And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

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to all intents is dead, / Who dyes to day, and will as long be so, / As he who dy’d a thousand years ago.” Montaigne, “That to Study Philosophy, is to Learn to Die,” I,128: “live as long as you can, you shall by that nothing shorten the space you are to lie dead in the Grave; ’tis all to no purpose; you shall be every whit as long in the condition you so much fear, as if you had died at Nurse. ‘—— licet quotvis vivendo vincere secla, / Mors æterna tamen, nihilominus illo manebit. [Lucretius III] / And live as many Ages as you will,  / Death ne’ertheless shall be eternal still.’ ” A similar thought is found in Aurelius, IV.xlii, p. 41: “For if thou shalt look backward; behold, what an infinite chaos of time doth present itself unto thee: and as infinite a chaos, if thou shalt look forward. In that which is so infinite, what difference can there be between that which liveth but three days, and that which liveth three ages?” 77. P: “His happiness depends on his Ignorance to a certain degree.” 78. See Horace, Odes, iii.29.29, and citations of the poem by Montaigne and Leibniz. Montaigne, “Of Prognostications,” I,67: “Th’eternal Mover has in Shades of Night / Future Events conceal’d from humane sight, / And laughs when he does see the timorous Ass / Tremble at what shall never come to pass.” Leibniz, p. 154, quoting that poem: “It were better always to have room for hope; and this is an occasion, with a thousand others, where our ignorance is beneficial. // Prudens futuri temporis exitum / Caliginosa nocte premit Deus.” 79. P: “See this pursued in Epist. 3. vers. 70, &c. [And till he ends the being, makes it blest] 83, &c. [Whether with Reason, or with Instinct blest].” Voltaire in his copy of Works 1735 notes: “tu parles desprits / il faut auparavant / prouver quil y en a.” “you talk of spirits—one must first demonstrate that there are such things.” 89–90. HLM (LGA 320–21): “No Great, no Little! ’Tis as much decreed / That Virgil’s Gnat should dye, as Cæsar bleed.” All but the first four words of this couplet are scored through either diagonally or horizontally. *

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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. Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never Is, but always To be blest: The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come. †

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91. P: “And on his Hope of a Relation to a future State.” Voltaire in his copy of Works 1735 notes: “what can I hope / when all is right?” 93–94. Variation: “Edit. I. Fol. & Quart. Essay on Man. Epist. I. Ver. 89, 90 / What Bliss above he gives not thee to know, / But gives that Hope to be thy Bliss below. / Ed. 2 What future Bliss - - / - - to be thy blessing now.” HLM (LGA 320–21): “What bliss above, he gives not thee to know, / But gives that Hope to be thy bliss below.” Pope switches from a spatial to a temporal metaphor for the afterlife. 1736, with underlinings transcribed as italics: “What future bliss, he gives thee not to know, / But gives that Hope to be thy blessing now.” In the palindrome of future bliss/blessing now (already ornamented by the variation of the noun) the second term is always italicized—first the noun, then the adjective/adverb of time. 94. P: “Further open’d in Epist. 2. vers. 265.[Till then, Opinion gilds with varying rays]—Epist. 3 vers. 78.[As, while he dreads it, makes him hope it too:]—Epist. 4. vers. 336, &c.[Hope of known bliss, and Faith in bliss unknown:]” 97. MLM: “The Soul uneasy, & confin’d at home” (LGA 212–13), also in HLM (LGA 320–21), and preserved in all editions to 1743a. Whether the soul is at home or from home when united with the body implies two very different attitudes. See 2 Cor. 5:6: “whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord.” 98. Variation: “Ed. I. Ver. 95. If to be perfect in a certain State, / What matter, here or there, or soon or late? / He that is blest to day, as fully so, / As who began ten thousand years ago. / Omitted in the subsequent Editions.” They are I.73–76 in the present edition. MLM includes after I.98 the following couplet: “No Great, no Little! and as much decreed  / That Virgils Gnat should die, as Caesar bleed” (LGA 212–13). The lines perhaps anticipate I.279–80. 91–98. Montaigne, “That Our Affections Carry Themselves Beyond Us,” I,16, uses language that harmonizes with Pope here, and elsewhere in the Essay: “Such as accuse Mankind of the Folly of gaping and panting after future things, and advise us to make our benefit of those which are present, and to set up our rest upon them, as having too short a reach to lay hold upon that which is to come, and it being more impossible for us, than to retrieve what is past; have hit upon the most universal of Human Errours, if that may be call’d an Errour to which Nature it self has dispos’d us, who in order to the subsistence, and continuation of her own Work, has, amongst several others, prepossess’d us with this deceiving Imagination, as being more jealous of our Action, than afraid of our Knowledge. For we are never present with, but al*

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alex ander pope Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor’d mind Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind; His soul proud Science never taught to stray Far as the solar walk, or milky way; Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv’n, Behind the cloud-topt hill, an humbler heav’n; Some safer world in depth of woods embrac’d, Some happier island in the watry waste, Where slaves once more their native land behold, No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold!

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ways beyond our selves. Fear, Desire and Hope, are still pushing us on towards the future, depriving us in the mean time of the sense and Consideration of that which is, to amuse us with the thought of what shall be, even when we shall be no more. / ‘Calamitosus est animus futuri anxius. /—Seneca, Epist. 98. / A Mind that anxious is of things to come, / Is still abroad, finding no rest at home.’ ” Pope may be, particularly if we remember the earlier reading (confined at home), sympathetic with this Senecan view of the soul perpetually tossed around by anxieties for the future, even though the tenor of this verse paragraph is firmly in favor of hope, and therefore contrasts with Montaigne. Montaigne’s response to the Platonic theory of anamnesis also captures the contradictions inherent in a view of the soul being at once constrained (in the body) and immortal, “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde,” II,377: “to say, that the Corporal Prison does in such sort suffocate her Natural Faculties, that they are there utterly extinct, is first, contrary to this other Belief of acknowledging her Power to be so great, and the Operations of it, that Men sensibly perceive in this Life so admirable, as to have thereby concluded this Divinity, and past Eternity, and the Immortality to come.” 102. MLM (LGA 212–13) annotates “milky way”: “The ancient opinion yt ye Souls of ye Just went thither See Tully Somn.Scipion. Manil. l.” Cicero, Dream, pp. 139–41: “[8 (16)] ‘But you, Scipio, as your grandfather here did, and as I who begot you have done, must practise justice and do your duty: your duty which is great towards parents and family, but greatest of all towards your country. By living thus you may find the way to heaven, into this gathering of those who have lived their lives, and being now freed from the body, inhabit that place which you see—’ (this was a circle of brilliant whiteness, shining out and surrounded by flames) ‘—which you have learnt from the Greeks to call the Milky Way.’ ” Manilius, I, p. 30, discussing what the Milky Way might be made from: “Or Souls which loos’d from the ignoble Chain / Of Clay, and sent to their own Heaven again, / Purg’d from all dross by Vertue, nobly rise / In Æther wanton, and enjoy the Skies.” He lists the Greek and Roman heroes who might be found there, ending with Augustus. The solar walk is the course of the sun. 108. HLM (LGA 320–21) records these additional lines, beginning a new verse paragraph: “But does He say, the Maker is not good, / Till he’s exalted to the what State he wou’d, / Himself alone high Heav’ns peculiar care, / Alone made happy, when he *

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To Be, contents his natural desire, He asks no Angel’s wing, no Seraph’s fire; But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company. IV. Go, wiser thou! and in thy scale of sense Weigh thy Opinion against Providence; Call Imperfection what thou fancy’st such, Say, here he gives too little, there too much; Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust, Yet cry, If Man’s unhappy, God’s unjust; If Man alone ingross not Heav’n’s high care, Alone made perfect here, immortal there: Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod, Re-judge his justice, be the God of God! In Pride, in reas’ning Pride, our error lies; All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies.

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will, and where?” “peculiar care” prefigures IV.135. These lines were printed in almost this form in 1733a. John Toland, Clito, p. 12, calls William III “His People’s Darling, Heav’ns peculiar care.” 111. Voltaire in his copy of Works 1735 notes: “voila une plaisante esperance de vivre / eternellement avec son chien.” “here’s a pleasant hope—to live eternally with one’s dog.” 109–12. MLM (LGA 214–15) contains the following lines, struck through in the MS, that emphasize different stereotypical qualities of the Native American from the simplicity that figures here, such as victimization by imperial rapine, stoic indifference to adversity, and piety: “Where Gold n’er grows, & never Spaniards come,  / Where Trees bear maize, & Rivers flow w.th Rum / Exil’d or chain’d, he lets you understand / Death but returns him to his native Land; / Or firm as Martyrs, smiling yields the ghost, / Rich of a Life, that is not to be lost.” 113. P: “�e Pride of aiming at more Knowledge and Perfection, and the Impiety of pretending to judge of the Dispensations of Providence, the causes of his Error and Misery.” 115. HLM (LGA 322–23): “Call Imperfection what we fancy such.” Voltaire in his copy of Works 1735 notes: “peut on donc ne pas gemir / detre en proye a tant de maux? / pouras tu nous prouver / que tout cela est si bon? pitoiable sottise.” “may we not then complain of being prey to so many ills? could you prove to us that all this is so good? pitiable nonsense.” 123–24. Temple, “An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning,” I,164: “But what would we have unless it be other Natures and Beings than God Almighty has given us? The Height of our Statures may be Six or Seven Foot, and we would have it Sixteen; the Length of our Age may reach to a Hundred Years, and we would have it *

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alex ander pope Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes, Men would be Angels, Angels would be Gods. Aspiring to be Gods, if Angels fell, Aspiring to be Angels, Men rebel; And who but wishes to invert the laws Of Order, sins against th’Eternal Cause. V. Ask for what end the heav’nly bodies shine, Earth for whose use? Pride answers, “’Tis for mine: “For me kind Nature wakes her genial pow’r, “Suckles each herb, and spreads out ev’ry flow’r; “Annual for me, the grape, the rose renew “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 foot-stool earth, my canopy the skies.” But errs not Nature from this gracious end, From burning suns when livid deaths descend, When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweep Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep? “No (’tis reply’d) the first Almighty Cause

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a Thousand. We are born to grovel upon the Earth, and we would fain sore up to the Skies.” See also notes to II.1–51. 131. P: “�e Absurdity of conceiting himself the Final Cause of the Creation or expecting that Perfection in the moral world which is not in the natural.” 133–34. The formulation of MLM (LGA 216–17) participates in the sequence of images of creation as an art object, and perhaps also suggests that Nature rather than God is its maker. Pride is speaking: “For me young Nature paints her vernal bower, / Suckles each herb, and pencils ev’ry flow’r.” HLM (LGA 322–23) has “For me young kind Nature decks wakes her genial vernal Pow’r, / Suckles each Herb, and spreads out pencils ev’ry Flow’r.” 142. Lucan, Pharsalia, trans. by Nicholas Rowe (London, 1718), p. 337, VIII.901–2: “Nor Agonies, nor livid Death, disgrace / The sacred Features of the Hero’s Face.” In Pope’s index to his translation of Homer’s Iliad the first entry for Apollo under the heading for the characters of the gods is as a cause of plague, referring to Iliad, I.61– 76, TE VII,88–90. The ancient association of the sun with plague was still reported in the early eighteenth century, as when Giorgio Baglivi, �e Practice of Physick, Reduc’d to the Ancient Way of Observations (London, 1704), p. 194, reports from Livy that “the dryness of the Soil and excessive heat of the Sun occasion’d a Plague [in Rome] in the Consulship of L. Val. Potitus and M. Manlius.” *

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“Acts not by partial, but by gen’ral laws; “Th’exceptions few; some change since all began, “And what created perfect?” — Why then Man? If the great end be human Happiness, Then Nature deviates; and can Man do less? As much that end a constant course requires Of show’rs and sun-shine, as of Man’s desires; As much eternal springs and cloudless skies, As Men for ever temp’rate, calm, and wise. If plagues or earthquakes break not Heav’n’s design, Why then a Borgia, or a Catiline? Who knows but he, whose hand the light’ning forms, *

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145–46. HLM (LGA 324–25): “Blame we for this the dread wise Almighty Cause? / No (’tis reply’d) he acts by Gen’ral Laws.” 147. Whether the laws God institutes at creation are subject to change is controversial, as is God’s role in any such change. Creech’s Manilius, IV, p. 38, notes change in the solar system and return to its original disposition: “Nor is this strange, for through the mighty Frame / There’s nothing that continues still the same: / As Years wheel round, a change must needs ensue, / Things lose their former State, and take a new. [ . . . ] So much as Years roul round, the mighty Frame / Is chang’d, yet still returns to be the same.” Boethius, IV.vi, pp. 93–94, describes a God impelling and supervising the creation: “Meanwhile the high Creator rules aloft; / Tight rein he wields over the world, / Source and beginning, king and lord and law, / Wise arbiter of just and right, / He first impels all things in motion; then / The errant parts he halts, pulls back,  / To regulate their wandering course. Unless  / He then recalled them to their paths, / And forced them to resume their circling course, / All that fixed order now contains, / Detached from its true source, would fall apart.” Samuel Clarke held that, from the human perspective, there was change in the universe such that fundamental laws were altered, Leibniz-Clarke, pp. 22–23: “The present frame of the solar system (for instance,) according to the present laws of motion, will in time fall into confusion; and perhaps, after that, will be amended or put into a new form. But this amendment is only relative, with regard to our conceptions.” James McLaverty agrees with MM that this passage is an example of staccato speech and so does not present Pope’s views. It is an example of the use of inverted commas “to bracket certain statements from the main discourse, giving them an equivocal status,” Pope, Print, and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 122. 156. Cesare Borgia (1475–1507) ruled a large part of central Italy at the turn of the sixteenth century. He is regarded as aberrant as he possibly murdered his brother to become captain-general of the papal army. Lucius Sergius Catilina (c. 108–62 bc) was a politician and soldier frequently associated with plots of political assassination. He competed for the consulate against Cicero, who charged him with treason. He was declared a public enemy by the Senate and died fighting republican forces. *

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alex ander pope Who heaves old Ocean, and who wings the storms, Pours fierce Ambition in a Cæsar’s mind, Or turns young Ammon loose to scourge mankind? From pride, from pride, our very reas’ning springs; Account for moral, as for nat’ral things: 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, Were there all harmony, all virtue here; That never air or ocean felt the wind; That never passion discompos’d the mind: But all subsists by elemental strife; And Passions are the elements of Life. The gen’ral Order, since the whole began, Is kept in Nature, and is kept in Man. VI. What would this Man? Now upward will he soar, And little less than Angel, would be more; Now looking downwards, just as griev’d appears To want the strength of bulls, the fur of bears. Made for his use all creatures if he call, Say what their use, had he the pow’rs of all? Nature to these, without profusion kind, *

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159. Presumably Gaius Julius Caesar (100–44 bc), known for his military campaigns in the Gallic and civil wars. 160. Alexander the Great (356–323 bc), ruler of Macedon and leader of military campaigns in Persia, was known as Ammon’s son, as he supposedly visited the temple of this Egyptian god, where the priest called him the son of god. 161. HLM (LGA 324–25) here records lines scored out in favor of the printed text: “From whence all Physical, or Moral Ill? / ’Tis Nature wandring from th’ Eternal Will.” A version of these lines is found at IV.111–12. Voltaire in his copy of Works 1735 notes: “no but from our / wants and from / our own miseri.” 169. Elizabeth Singer, “On the Creation,” in �e Fifth Part of Miscellany Poems, 5th ed. (London, 1727), p. 169: “the Almighty Fiat, once again  / Pronounc’d [ . . . ]  / Awoke the tender Principles of Life, / And urg’d the growing Elemental Strife.” 170. P: “See this subject extended in Epist. 2. from vers. 90 [Exalt their kind, and take some Virtue’s name.], to 112 [Gives all the strength and colour of our life.], 155 [A mightier Pow’r the strong direction sends,], &c.” 174. P: “�e unreasonableness of the Complaints against Providence, and that to possess more Faculties would make us miserable.” *

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The proper organs, proper pow’rs assign’d; Each seeming want compensated of course, Here with degrees of swiftness, there of force; All in exact proportion to the state; Nothing to add, and nothing to abate. Each beast, each insect, happy in its own; Is Heav’n unkind to Man, and Man alone? Shall he alone, whom rational we call, Be pleas’d with nothing, if not bless’d with all? The bliss of Man (could Pride that blessing find) Is not to act or think beyond mankind; *

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180. Manilius, having given guidance on how to calculate the relative positions of the stars, III, p. 110: “The Signs true Setting, and true Rising trace, / Assign to each their proper Powers and Place.” 182. P: “It is a certain Axiom in the Anatomy of Creatures, that in proportion as they are form’d for Strength their Swiftness is lessen’d; or as they are form’d for Swiftness, the Strength is abated.” 185. P: “Vid. Epist. 3. vers. 83 [Whether with Reason, or with Instinct blest,], &c. and 110 [Its proper bliss, and sets its proper bounds:], &c.” 187–88. MLM (LGA 218–19) and HLM (LGA 326–27): “Shall Man, shall reasonable Man alone, / Be, or endow’d with all, or pleas’d with none?” 173–88. Montaigne, “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde,” II,206–8: “Nature has been generally kind to all her Creatures, and there is not one, she has not amply furnished with all means necessary for the Conservation of his Being. For the common Complaints that I hear Men make (as the Liberty of their Opinions do one while lift them up to the Clouds, and then again depress them to the Antipodes) that we are the only Animal abandon’d, naked upon the bare Earth, tyed and bound, not having wherewithal to arm and cloath us, but by the spoil of others [ . . . ] Those Complaints are false; there is in the Polity of the World a greater Equity, and more uniform Relation.” 190. MLM (LGA 222–23) and HLM (LGA 330–31): “Is not to know, or think, beyond Mankind.” Pope removes the contradiction of man knowing what man can’t know, by revising to “act,” which suggests impersonation or stagecraft as well as agency. 1736 has “The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find) / Is, not to act, or think, beyond mankind;” The cleaner text makes this couplet a contradiction: man could never think beyond man. Montaigne, “Of Moderation,” I,350: “A man may both be too much in Love with Vertue, and be excessive in a just Action. Holy Writ agrees with this, Be not wiser than you should; but be soberly Wise.” The citation is probably Rom. 12:3: “For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.” For a contrasting view, see Montaigne, “Of Experience,” III,48: “No generous Mind can stop *

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alex ander pope No pow’rs of body or of soul to share, But what his nature and his state can bear. 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, T’inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav’n? Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o’er, To smart and agonize at ev’ry pore? Or quick effluvia darting thro’ the brain, *

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in itself, it will still pretend further, and beyond its power; it has Sallies beyond its Effects.” Montaigne, “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde,” II,381–82, also reflects on the reasonableness of there being limits to human understanding, but notes the evidence of historical development of human knowledge: “�eophrastus said, that human Knowledge, guided by the Sences, might judg of the Causes of things to a certain degree; but that being arriv’d to first and extream Causes, it must stop short and retire, by reason either of its own infirmity, or the difficulty of things. ’Tis a moderate and gentle Opinion, that our own Understandings may conduct us to the knowledge of some things, and that it has certain Measures of Power, beyond which, ’tis Temerity to employ it. This Opinion is plausible, and introduced by Men of well-compos’d Minds; but ’tis hard to limit our Wit, ’tis curious and greedy, and will no more stop at a thousand, than at fifty Paces. Having my self experimentally found, that wherein one has failed, the other has hit, and that what was unknown to one Age, the Age following has explain’d; and that Arts and Sciences are not cast in a Mould, but are form’d and perfected by degrees, by often handling and polishing, as Bears leisurely lick their Cubs into shape; what my Force cannot discover, I do not yet desist to sound and to try: But handling and kneading this new Matter over, and over again, by turning and heating it, I lay open to him, that shall succeed me, a kind of Facility to injoy it more at his ease, and make it more maniable and supple for him.” 191–92. MLM (LGA 222–23) and HLM (LGA 330–31): “No self-confounding Faculties to share, / No Senses stronger than his brain can bear.” 1733a retains that form of the lines. 193–96. MM cites Locke, II.xxiii.12, pp. 302–3: “The infinite wise Contriver of us, and all things about us, hath fitted our Senses, Faculties, and Organs, to the conveniences of Life, and the Business we have to do here. [ . . . ] if [ . . . ] Seeing were in any Man 1000, or 10000 times more acute than it is now by the best Microscope [ . . . ] he would come nearer the Discovery of the Texture and Motion of the minute Parts of corporeal things [ . . . ] But then he would be in a quite different World from other People.” And Henry Baker, �e Microscope Made Easy (London, 1742), p. 230: “What a Power then of magnifying are such Eyes [those of lice and mites] endued with!” 198. Lucretius, III, p. 76, notes in similar language the effect that powerful bodily concussions have upon the sensible matter that makes up the fourth element of mind: *

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Die of a rose in aromatic pain? If nature thunder’d in his op’ning ears, And stunn’d him with the music of the spheres, 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, Alike in what it gives, and what denies? 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, From the green myriads in the peopled grass: What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme, The mole’s dim curtain, and the lynx’s beam: Of smell, the headlong lioness between, *

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alex ander pope And hound sagacious on the tainted green: Of hearing, from the life that fills the flood, To that which warbles thro’ the vernal wood: The spider’s touch, how exquisitely fine! Feels at each thread, and lives along the line: In the nice bee, what sense so subtly true From pois’nous herbs extracts the healing dew: How Instinct varies in the grov’ling swine, Compar’d, half-reas’ning elephant, with thine: ’Twixt that, and Reason, what a nice barrier; For ever sep’rate, yet for ever near! Remembrance and Reflection how ally’d; What thin partitions Sense from Thought divide: And Middle natures, how they long to join, Yet never pass th’insuperable line! Without this just gradation, could they be Subjected these to those, or all to thee? The pow’rs of all subdu’d by thee alone, Is not thy Reason all these pow’rs in one? VIII. See, thro’ this air, this ocean, and this earth, All matter quick, and bursting into birth. Above, how high progressive life may go! Around, how wide! how deep extend below! Vast chain of being, which from God began, Natures æthereal, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect! what no eye can see,

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Membranes which line the Nose and its Lamellæ. In Men these Lamellæ are few, and the Passage thro’ the Nose not difficult, hence fewer Effluvia will strike the Nerves, than in Animals of more exquisite Smell, whose Noses being full of Lamellæ, and the Passage for the Air Narrow and Crooked, few of the Effluvia escape one place or another, besides their Olfactory Nerves may be more sensible.” 233. P: “How much farther this Gradation and Subordination may extend? were any part of which broken, the whole connected Creation must be destroy’d.” 234. See Bacon, Essayes, “Of Vicissitude of Things,” p. 172: “Certain it is, that the Matter, is in a Perpetual Flux, and never at a Stay.” Also Clarke’s quotation from Leibniz in Leibniz-Clarke, pp. 128–29: “Every part of matter is, by its form, continually acting. [ . . . ] I admit everywhere in bodies, a principle superior to the (common) notion of matter; a principle active, and (if I may so speak), vital.” 238–39. These lines list varying degrees of being in their distance from God, with *

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No glass can reach! from Infinite to thee, From thee to Nothing! — On superior pow’rs Were we to press, inferior might on ours: Or in the full creation leave a void, Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroy’d: From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike, Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike. And if each system in gradation roll, Alike essential to th’amazing whole; The least confusion but in one, not all

240

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the first two elements (angels and humans) repeated in I.238, so that the items run a, b, a, b, / c, d, e, f. MLM (LGA 222–23), HLM (LGA 330–31), and 1733a may present a declining sequence without repetition: “Ethereal Essence, Spirit, Substance, Man, / Beast, Bird, Fish, Insect.” Pope records this change as a variation. 233–41. Thomson, Summer, 333–37: “Has any seen / The mighty chain of beings, lessening down / From infinite perfection to the brink / Of dreary nothing, desolate abyss! / From which astonished thought recoiling turns?” �e Guardian, ed. by John Calhoun Stephens (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), p. 419, no. 126, Wednesday, 5 August: “we are linked by an imperceptible Chain to every Individual of the Human Race.” Stephens attributes this essay to George Berkeley. 233–42. See Chudleigh, “Of Pride,” p. 264: “if, after having made these Reflections, we farther consider, that there being a Scale of Beings, which reaches from the first Cause to the most imperceptible Effect, from the infinite Creator to the smallest of his Productions, we have reason to believe, that as we see an innumerable Company of Beings below us, and each Species to be less perfect in its Kind, till they end in a Point, an indivisible Solid: so there are almost an infinite Number of Beings above us, who as much exceed us, as we do the minutest Insect, or the smallest Plant, and, in comparison of whom, the most elevated Genius’s, the greatest Masters of Reason, the most illuminated and unweary’d Enquirers after Knowledge, are but Children, such as hardly deserve to be of the lowest Form in the School of Wisdom, we cannot but have contemptible Thoughts of our selves, cannot but blush at our own Arrogance, and look back with Shame on the several Instances of our Folly.” 241–43. For a correspondence with Leibniz, p. 131, see introduction, p. lxi. 244. Richard Bentley, A Sermon Preach’d Before His Majesty King George [ . . . ] Sunday February 3. 1716/17 (London, 1717), p. 8: “we must all continue in our settled Rank and Degree, as God was pleas’d to place Mankind in the great Scale of the Creation: ’tis the Will and Decree of God, that we are what we are.” 241–46. Voltaire in his copy of Works 1735 notes: “cela nest pas vrai. la / destruction du murex / na pas aneanti le monde. / otez de ce globe les / animaux; il nen roulera / pas moins dans lespace.” “that is not true. the destruction of the murex did not annihilate the world. remove animals from the globe; it would roll through space nonetheless.” *

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alex ander pope That system only, but the whole must fall. Let Earth unbalanc’d from her orbit fly, Planets and Suns run lawless thro’ the sky, Let ruling Angels from their spheres be hurl’d, Being on being wreck’d, and world on world, Heav’n’s whole foundations to their centre nod, And Nature tremble to the throne of God: All this dread Order break — for whom? for thee? Vile worm! — oh Madness, Pride! Impiety! IX. What if the foot, ordain’d the dust to tread, Or hand to toil, aspir’d to be the head? What if the head, the eye, or ear repin’d To serve mere engines to the ruling Mind? Just as absurd for any part to claim To be another, in this gen’ral frame: Just as absurd, to mourn the tasks or pains, The great directing Mind of All ordains. All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;

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252. Horace, Epistles, I.xii.17, lists the things Iccius might be thinking about: “stellae sponte sua iussaene vagentur et errent,” “whether the stars roam at large of their own will or by law.” 251–56. Variation: “These six Lines are added since the first Edition.” 258. P: “�e Extravagance, Impiety, and Pride of such a desire.” 259–60. Pascal, p. 292: “A Christian loves himselfe as a Member of that Body of which JESUS CHRIST is the Head: and he loves JESUS CHRIST, as the Head of that Body of which he is himself a Member. Both these Motions center and conspire in the same Affection. If the Feet or the Hands were endued with a separate Will, they could never preserve their Natural Order and Employment, otherwise than by submitting this Private Will to that general and superior Will, which has the Government of the whole Body.” 265. P: “Vid. the prosecution and application of this in Epist. 4. ver [sic] 160. [Why is not Man a God, and Earth a Heav’n?]” 268. This line is among the most controversial of the poem, as Pope seems to embrace an ancient Stoic doctrine that God is the soul of the world, rather than a distinct, ulterior, active intelligence forming the world. Among his contemporaries Pope is closer to Toland than to Clarke. Plutarch, p. 812: “Thales saith, that God is the soule of the world. [ . . . ] Democritus is perswaded, that God is a minde of a firie nature, and the soule of the world.” Aurelius, IV.xxxiii, p. 37: “Ever consider and think upon the world as being but one living substance, and having but one soul, and *

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a n essay on m a n That, chang’d thro’ all, and yet in all the same, Great in the earth, as in th’æthereal frame,

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how all things in the world, are terminated into one sensitive power.” Manilius, “Preface,” p. 61: “The Stoicks Principles were in short these: They say there is one Infinite, Eternal, Almighty Mind, which being difus’d thro’ the whole Universe of well order’d and regularly dispos’d Matter, actuates every part of it, and is as it were, the Soul of this vast Body.” See also the main text I.vi, p. 31: “God the World’s Almighty Soul.” Creech in a footnote, p. 55, n. 15: “Release this Soul from that union which the Stoicks foolishly assign’d, and then to hold a Soul of the World and Providence is all one.” Also, pp. 59–60: “I’ll sing how God the World’s Almighty Mind  / Thro’ All infus’d, and to that All confin’d, / Directs the Parts, and with an equal Hand / Supports the whole, enjoying his Command: / How All agree, and how the Parts have made / Strict Leagues, subsisting by each others Aid; / How All by Reason move, because one Soul / Lives in the Parts, diffusing thro’ the while [for ‘whole’]. // For did not all the Friendly Parts conspire / To make one Whole, and keep the Frame intire; / And did not Reason guide, and Sense controul / The vast stupendous Machine of the whole, / Earth would not keep its place, the Skies would fall, / And universal Stiffness deaden All.” The last couplet cited is echoed at I.251–52 and also provides a hint for Dunciad B IV.656, TE V,409: “And Universal Darkness buries All.” John Toland, Clito, p. 8: “WHO form’d the Universe, and when and why, / Or if all things were from Eternity;  / What Laws to Nature were prescrib’d by Jove;  / Where lys his chiefest residence above; / Or if he’s only but the World’s great Soul; / Or parts the Creatures are, and God the whole / From whence all Beings their Existence have, / And into which resolv’d they find a Grave.” Samuel Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God and Other Writings, ed. by Ezio Vailati (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 46: “What some have fondly imagined concerning a soul of the world, if thereby they mean a created, dependent being, signifies nothing in the present argument. But if they understand thereby something necessary and self-existent, then it is nothing else but a false, corrupt, and imperfect notion of God.” Leibniz-Clarke, p. 19, L.II.10: “Will they say, that he [God] is intelligentia mundana; that is, the soul of the world? I hope not”; pp. 40–41, L.IV.27–34: “There is hardly any expression less proper upon this subject, than that which makes God to have a sensorium. It seems to make God the soul of the world. [ . . . ] God perceives things in himself. Space is the place of things, and not the place of God’s ideas: unless we look upon space as something that makes an union between God and things, in imitation of the imagined union between the soul and the body; which would still make God the soul of the world. [ . . . ] Those who undertake to defend the vulgar opinion concerning the soul’s influence over the body, by instancing in God’s operating on things external; make God still too much like a soul of the world.” See also the selection from the general scholium of Newton’s Principia excerpted in Alexander’s edition of Leibniz-Clarke, p. 166: “Deity is the dominion of God not over his own body, as those imagine who fancy God to be the soul of the world, but over servants.”

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alex ander pope Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees, Lives thro’ all life, extends thro’ all extent, Spreads undivided, operates unspent, Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part, As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart; As full, as perfect, in vile Man that mourns, As the rapt Seraph that adores and burns; To him no high, no low, no great, no small; He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all. X. Cease then, nor Order Imperfection name: Our proper bliss depends on what we blame. Know thy own point: This kind, this due degree Of blindness, weakness, Heav’n bestows on thee. Submit. — In this, or any other sphere, Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear: Safe in the hand of one disposing Pow’r, Or in the natal, or the mortal hour. All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; All Discord, Harmony, not understood; All partial Evil, universal Good:

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281. P: “�e Consequence of all, the absolute Submission due to Providence, both as to our present and future State.” 283. “point”: “position” rather than “purpose.” 289–92. Aurelius, I.xvii, p. 11: “All things flow from thence [providence]: and whatsoever it is that is, is both necessary, and conducing to the whole (part of which thou art), and whatsoever it is that is requisite and necessary for the preservation of the general, must of necessity for every particular nature, be good and behoveful.” George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Dublin, 1710), p. 210: “our Prospects are too narrow: We take, for Instance, the Idea of some one particular Pain into our Thoughts, and account it Evil; wheras if we enlarge our View, so as to comprehend the various Ends, Connexions, and Dependencies of things, on what Occasions and in what Proportions, we are affected with Pain and Pleasure, the Nature of Human Freedom, and the Design with which we are put into the World; we shall be forced to acknowledge that those particular Things which consider’d in themselves appear to be Evil, have the Nature of Good, when consider’d as link’d with the whole System of Beings.” For a correspondence to Leibniz, p. 201, see introduction, p. lxi. *

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a n essay on m a n And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite, One truth is clear, “Whatever is, is right.”

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294. 1736: “Whatever Is, is Right.” By romanizing “is,” by placing the whole in inverted commas, 1743b undifferentiates the emphasis of the half line and makes it a maxim. 1736 commands an emphasis on both the first “is” and “right,” but different forms of emphasis. See also IV.145n. Plotinus, III.2, 17, p. 155: “What is evil in the single soul will stand a good thing in the universal system; what in the unit offends nature will serve nature in the total event—and still remains the weak and wrong tone it is, though its sounding takes nothing from the worth of the whole, just as, in another order of image, the executioner’s ugly office does not mar the well-governed state: such an officer is a civic necessity, and the corresponding moral type is often serviceable; thus, even as things are, all is well.” *

EPISTLE II. A RG U M E N T.

Of the Nature and State of Man, with respect to Himself, as an Individual. I. T H E business of Man not to pry into God, but to study himself. His Middle Nature; his Powers and Frailties, Ver. 1 to 18. �e Limits of his Capacity, Ver. 19, &c. II. �e two Principles of Man, Self-love and Reason, both necessary, Ver. 53, &c. Self-love the stronger, and why, Ver. 67, &c. �eir end the same, Ver. 81, &c. III. �e Passions, and their use, Ver. 93 to 130. �e predominant Passion, and its force, Ver. 131 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. 203 to 216. V. How odious Vice in itself, and how we deceive ourselves into it, Ver. 217. VI. �at, 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. 242. How useful they are to Society, Ver. 249. And to the Individuals, Ver. 261. In every state, and every age of life, Ver. 271, &c. *

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N OW then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. †

P: “Of the Nature and State of Man as an Individual. �e business of Man not to pry into God, but to study himself. His Middle Nature, his Power, Frailties, and the Limits of his Capacity.” 1–2. Variation: “Ver. 2. Edit. I. / �e only Science of Mankind is Man. / Ed. 2. �e proper Study - - .” MLM (LGA 234–35) and HLM (LGA 340–41) present various revisions in which man is commanded to learn himself, when the first person plural rather than singular is used, where the only science of mankind is man, and where *

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Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest, In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast; In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer, Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much: Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d; Still by himself abus’d, or disabus’d; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl’d: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

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man either knows, should know, or is convinced of that fact. Both MSS retain the form “not God presume to scan.” Contrast Montaigne, “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde,” II,376–77: “In earnest, Protagoras told us a pretty Flam, in making Man the measure of all things, that never knew so much as his own. If it be not he, his Dignity will not permit, that any other Creature should have this Advantage. Now he being so contrary in himself, and one Judgment so incessantly subverting another, this favourable Proposition was but a Mockery, which induc’d us necessarily to conclude the Nullity of the Compass and the Compasser; when �ales reputes the knowledg of Man very difficult for Man to Comprehend, he at the same time gives him to understand, that all other Knowledge is impossible.” 17. “Error is endless” is no. 1383 in Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs; Wise Sentences and Witty Sayings, Ancient and Modern, Foreign and British (London, 1732), p. 53. The phrase appears in a variety of contexts Pope may have known. Roger L’Estrange, Seneca’s Morals Abstracted (London, 1679), p. 85: “He that is in his way, is in hope of coming to his Journeys End; but Error is Endless. Let every Man therefore Examine his Desires, whether they be according to Rectify’d Nature, or Not.” Richard Blackmore, Prince Arthur, 4th ed. (London, 1714), p. 71: “Long have I stray’d in endless Error lost.” Peter Browne, �e Procedure, Extent and Limits of Human Understanding (London, 1729), p. 477: “The Mind of Man, while it keeps within its own proper Sphere, acts with Freedom and Security; but when it strives to exert itself beyond its Native Powers and Faculties, then it sinks into Weakness and Infirmity; and is ever liable to endless Mistake and Error.” Edward Young, Imperium Pelagi (London, 1730), p. 50: “The Fools of Nature ever strike, / On bare Outsides; and loath, or like, / As Glitter bids; in endless Error vie.” 18. MLM (LGA 234–35) and HLM (LGA 342–45) here have some lines scored *

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alex ander pope Go, wond’rous creature! mount where Science guides, Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides; *

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through vertically that imagine the monkey and the pet dog aspiring to humanity. HLM (LGA 344–45) includes a shoulder note indicating that the couplet on the pet dog, and II.19–42, should be reserved for the epistle on the use and extent of learning, part of the larger scheme for the ethic epistles. See introduction, pp. l–lii. 19–20. On the measurement of the earth MM cites Chambers’s entry “earth,” in Cyclopaedia, I,262–63. Newton’s gravitational theory suggested that the earth was an oblate spheroid, whereas early eighteenth-century French work on the meridian arc suggested that the earth was a prolate spheroid. Robert Boyle conducted experiments with air pumps that trapped air between two quantities of mercury in order to test pressure and weight. For an account, see Robert Boyle, New Experiments PhysicoMechanical, Touching the Air (Oxford, 1682), p. 138, Experiment XXXVI. The topic was already being discussed. See Henry Stubbe, A Specimen of Some Animadversions upon a Book Entituled, Plus Ultra . . . by Mr. Joseph Glanvill (London, 1670), p. 161: “whosoever would weigh the Air exactly, and estimate the accession of weight which the Air receives from winds, clouds, or vapours (the thing Mr. Glanvill promiseth us) must weigh the Air singly first.” Thomas Shadwell, �e Virtuoso, in �e Dramatick Works of �omas Shadwell, 4 vols. (London, 1720), I,387–92, mocks weighing air. Newton’s theory of gravity also offered an explanation of tides. On the history of tidal science, see David Edgar Cartwright, Tides: A Scientific History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 25–50. Cicero, On Duties, p. 159 (I.xliii), rates social activity above abstract knowledge: “For who is so absorbed in the investigation and study of creation, but that, even though he were working and pondering over tasks never so much worth mastering and even though he thought he could number the stars and measure the length and breadth of the universe, he would drop all those problems and cast them aside, if word were suddenly brought to him of some critical peril to his country, which he could relieve or repel?” John Tillotson, Sermons Preach’d Upon Several Occasions, 2nd ed. (London, 1673), pp. 14–15, notes the vanity of such knowledge in comparison with knowledge of God and Christ: “If a man by a vast and imperious mind, and a heart large as the sand upon the Seashore, (as it is said of Solomon) could command all the knowledg of Nature and Art, of words and things; could attain to a mastery in all Languages, and sound the depths of all Arts and Sciences, measure the earth and the heavens, and tell the stars, and give an account of their order and motions; could discourse of the interests of all States, the intrigues of all constitutions, and give an account of the History of all ages; could speak of trees, from the Cedar tree that is in Lebanon, even unto the Hysop that springeth out of the wall; and of beasts also, and of fowls, and of creeping things, and of fishes: and yet should, in the mean time, be destitute of the knowledg of God, and Christ, and his duty; all this would be but an impertinent vanity, and a more glittering kind of ignorance; and such a man (like the Philosopher, who whilst he was gazing upon the stars, fell into the ditch) would but sapienter descendere in infernum, be undone with all his knowledg, and with a great deal of wisdom go down to Hell.” *

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Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, Correct old Time, and regulate the Sun; Go, soar with Plato to th’empyreal sphere, To the first good, first perfect, and first fair; Or tread the mazy round his follow’rs trod, And quitting sense call imitating God; As Eastern priests in giddy circles run, And turn their heads to imitate the Sun. *

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21–22. Variation (slightly inaccurately recorded, with Pope reverting to the reading from the first edition): “Ver. 21. Ed. I, &c. Instruct the Planets in what Orbs to run, / Correct old Time, and regulate the Sun.  / Ed. 4, 5. Show by what Rules the wandring Planets stray, / Correct old Time, and teach the Sun his way.” All previous printed texts: “Show by what Laws the wand’ring Planets stray, / Correct old Time, and teach the Sun his way.” 23. Plato (427–347 bc), Athenian philosopher, follower of Socrates (see IV.236n), whose philosophical views he represented and promoted in a series of dialogues. He may be alluded to here on account of his theory of forms, positing the ideal existence of virtues and qualities of which all particular instantiations are but faint copies. Prior, I,171, Carmen Sæculare, lines 296–98: “upward She incessant flies; / Resolv’d to reach the high Empyrean Sphere, / And tell Great Jove, She sings His [William III’s] Image here.” John Theobald, “A Funeral Poem,” in Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1719), p. 103: “A great Contempt of all, that here / Below does Great appear, / Shall lift Him to th’Empyreal Sphere.” 25. Dryden, V(1987),214, Virgil’s Georgics, III.180–82: “The Lapithae to Chariots, added State / Of Bits and Bridles; taught the Steed to bound; / To run the Ring, and trace the mazy round.” Basil Kennet, Romæ Antiquæ Notitia (London, 1696), p. 255, in a translation of Virgil Aeneid, V.545ff., has coursers “trace the mazy Round.” In John Gay’s “The Hare and Many Friends,” in Fables (London, 1727), p. 171, the hare “doubles, to mis-lead the hound, / And measures back her mazy round.” 26. 1736: “quitting sense call imitating God.” The italicization marks the phrase as what another person has said or might say. The difference is significant, as the emphasis relieves Pope of the burden of sustaining a real opposition: it is this imagined interlocutor who describes her/his own behavior as imitating God, but which strikes the poet as quitting sense. 27–28. HLM (LGA 344–45) has, in a shoulder note addition to the main text, “So Eastern Madmen in a Circle run / & turn their brains to imitate the Sun.” Henry Bold, “To His Sacred Majesty Charles the Second, at His Happy Return,” in Henry Beeston and Henry Bold, A Poem to his Most Excellent Majesty Charles the Second (London, 1660), p. 9: “Whilst we (like Eastern Priests) the night being done, / Fall down, and Worship You, our Rising Sun.” Pope believed some forms of Islamic religious observance to involve inducing giddiness through rotating the body; see Corr., I,369, to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 10 November 1716: “How happy will it be, for *

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alex ander pope Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule — Then drop into thyself, and be a fool! Superior beings, when of late they saw A mortal Man unfold all Nature’s law, Admir’d such wisdom in an earthly shape, And shew’d a Newton as we shew an Ape. Could he, whose rules the rapid Comet bind, Describe or fix one movement of his Mind? Who saw its fires here rise, and there descend, Explain his own beginning, or his end?

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a gay young Woman, to live in a Country where it is a part of Religious worship to be giddy-headed?” (MM). 34. MLM (LGA 234–35) has a further couplet on Newton struck through: “Ah turn the glass! it shows thee all along / As weak in Conduct, as in science strong.” MM has “” for “Ah.” Isaac Newton (1642–1727) contributed greatly to the theory of gravitation and light, and along with Leibniz is credited with inventing calculus (the study of change, particularly of curves and areas contained by them). 35. MM cites John Theophilus Desaguliers, �e Newtonian System of the World [ . . . ] An Allegorical Poem (London, 1728), pp. 2–3n: “The Orbit of a Comet, which was first settled by Sir Isaac Newton, who has given us a Method from three Observations to determine the Path of a Comet, so as to be able to know where a Comet will pass as long as it is visible; how near it will go to the Sun; with what encreasing Velocity it will approach towards it; and with what decreasing Velocity it will recede from it, after it has pass’d by it. Dr. Halley has settled the whole Time of the Revolution of some of the Comets, so as to be able to foretel their Return, and to describe that remaining Part of their Orbit, in which they are invisible by Reason of their great Distance from the Sun which enlightens, and from us who should see them.” 36. BL C.122.e.31, II.36, p. 21, records Pope’s annotation inverting the terms here: “Fix, or describe.” Foxon (p. 223) says, “the transposition to ‘Fix, or describe, one movement of the mind?’ can only be judged subjectively; I feel that it is an improvement, and could rationalize my preference without convincing anyone who felt the converse.” A logical view suggests that what has not been fixed cannot be described (in the common sense of tracing a line), and so the correction may be defensible on more than subjective grounds. The order of the verbs in the printed texts (describe or fix) suggests either an inconsequential relationship between the verbs (one or the other, in no particular order or hierarchy), or requires “or” to have the sense of “nay,” “let alone.” P corrects an “or” to a “nay” in a similar context at IV.264, but there the sequence of terms is governed by social hierarchy rather than logical priority. 35–38. Variation: “Ver. 35. Ed. I. Could he, who taught each Planet where to roll, / Describe, or fix, one movement of the Soul? / Who mark’d their Points to rise or to descend, / Explain his own beginning, or his end? / Ed. 4. Could he whose Laws the whirling Comet *

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Alas what wonder! Man’s superior part Uncheck’d may rise, and climb from art to art: But when his own great work is but begun, What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone. Trace Science then, with Modesty thy guide; First strip off all her equipage of Pride, Deduct what is but Vanity, or Dress, Or Learning’s Luxury, or Idleness; Or tricks to shew the stretch of human brain, Mere curious pleasure, or ingenious pain: Expunge the whole, or lop th’excrescent parts Of all, our Vices have created Arts: Then see how little the remaining sum, Which serv’d the past, and must the times to come!

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bind, / Describe, or fix, one Movement of the Mind? / Who saw the Stars here rise, and here descend, / Explain his own beginning, or his end?” There is a parallel to Voltaire’s manner of rejecting Pascal’s insistence that science leads to the acknowledgment of ignorance, Letters, p. 137: “Newton did not know why a man’s arm moves when he wants it to, but he was not for that reason less learned about other things.” 47. Richard Blackmore, Creation (London, 1715), II, p. 38: the contemplation of the size and scale of the universe “The widest stretch of Human Thought exceeds.” 1–52. Temple, “An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning,” I,164–65, presents a sustained parallel to the opening of Epistle II: *

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But what would we have unless it be other Natures and Beings than God Almighty has given us? The Height of our Statures may be Six or Seven Foot, and we would have it Sixteen; the Length of our Age may reach to a Hundred Years, and we would have it a Thousand. We are born to grovel upon the Earth, and we would fain sore up to the Skies. We cannot comprehend the Growth of a Kernel or Seed, the Frame of an Ant or Bee; we are amazed at the Wisdom of the one, and Industry of the other, and yet we will know the Substance, the Figure, the Courses, the Influences of all those glorious Cœlestial Bodies, and the End for which they were made; we pretend to give a clear Account how Thunder and Lightning (that great Artillery of God Almighty) is produced, and we cannot comprehend how the Voice of a Man is framed, that poor little noise we make every time we speak. The Motion of the Sun is plain and evident to some Astronomers, and of the Earth to others, yet we none of us know which of them moves, and meet with many seeming Impossibilities in both, and beyond the Fathom of Human Reason or Comprehension. Nay, we do not so much as know what Motion is, nor how a Stone moves from our Hand, when we throw it cross the Street.

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alex ander pope II. Two Principles in human nature reign; Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain; Nor this a good, nor that a bad we call, Each works its end, to move or govern all: And to their proper operation still, Ascribe all Good; to their improper, Ill. Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul; *

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Of all these that most Ancient and Divine Writer gives the best Account in that short Satyr, Vain Man would fain be wise, when he is born like a Wild Ass’s Colt. But, God be thanked, his Pride is greater than his Ignorance; and what he wants in Knowledge, he supplies by Sufficiency. When he has looked about him as far as he can, he concludes there is no more to be seen; when he is at the End of his Line, he is at the Bottom of the Ocean; when he has shot his best, he is sure, none ever did nor ever can shoot better or beyond it. His own Reason is the certain Measure of Truth, his own Knowledge, of what is possible in Nature, though his Mind and his Thoughts change every Seven Years, as well as his Strength and his Features; nay, though his Opinions change every Week or every Day, yet he is sure, or at least confident, that his present Thoughts and Conclusions are just and true, born and subjected in the whole Course of his Life, he has this one Felicity to comfort and support him, that in all Ages, in all Things, every Man is always in the right. A Boy of Fifteen is wiser than his Father at Forty, the meanest Subject than his Prince or Governours; and the Modern Scholars, because they have for a Hundred Years past learned their Lesson pretty well, are much more knowing than the Ancients their Masters. 53. P: “�e Two Principles of Man, Self- love and Reason, both Necessary, 49 [Self-Love, the spring of motion, acts the soul:]. Self love the stronger, and why? 57 [Most strength the moving Principle requires;]. their End the same, 71 [Let subtile Schoolmen teach these friends to fight,].” 53–92. On the countervailing operations of the spirit, see Cicero, On Duties, p. 103 (I.xxviii): “the essential activity of the spirit is twofold: one force is appetite (that is, ὀρμή, in Greek), which impels a man this way and that; the other is reason, which teaches and explains what should be done and what should be left undone. The result is that reason commands, appetite obeys.” 56. MLM (LGA 236–37) and HLM (LGA 346–47) score through additional lines, in HLM as “Of good and evil Gods, what frighted Fools, / Of good and evil Reason, puzzled Schools  / Deceiv’d, deceiving, taught, to These refer:  / Know, both must operate, or both must err:” The rejected lines suggest that Manichaean views can be explained away by the contrast of self-love and reason. 59. �e Practical Works of the Late Reverend and Pious Mr. Richard Baxter, 4 vols. (London, 1707), III,335, offers a local and more general parallel for the epistle: “Tho’ the Creator planted in Man’s Nature the Principle of Natural Self-love, as the Spring of his Endeavours for Self-preservation, and a notable part of the Engine by which he *

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Reason’s comparing balance rules the whole. Man, but for that, no action could attend, And, but for this, were active to no end; Fix’d like a plant on his peculiar spot, To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot; Or, meteor-like, flame lawless thro’ the void, Destroying others, by himself destroy’d. Most strength the moving principle requires; Active its task, it prompts, impels, inspires. Sedate and quiet the comparing lies, Form’d but to check, delib’rate, and advise. Self-love still stronger, as its objects nigh; Reason’s at distance, and in prospect lie: That sees immediate good by present sense; Reason, the future and the consequence. Thicker than arguments, temptations throng, At best more watchful this, but that more strong. The action of the stronger to suspend

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governeth the World, yet were the Parts subservient to the whole, and the whole to God: And Self-love did subserve the Love of the Universe, and of God: And Man desired his own Preservation, for these higher Ends. When Sin stept in, it broke this Order; and taking Advantage from the natural innocent Principles of Self-love, it turned Man from the Love of God, and much abated his Love to his Neighbour and the publick Good, and turned him to Himself, by an inordinate Self-love, which terminateth in himself, and principally in his Carnal self, instead of God and the Common Good: So that Self is become All to corrupted Nature, as God was All to Nature in its Integrity.” 60. After this line MLM (LGA 236–37) and HLM (LGA 346–47) record a couplet, struck through with diagonal slashes in both MSS, in HLM as “The primal Impulse, and controlling Weight, / To give the motion, and to regulate.” 59–62. Plutarch, “Of Morall Vertue,” p. 68: “For need those actions have of a certaine instinct and motion to set them forward, which this Morall habitude doth make in each passion, and the same instinct requireth likewise the assistance of reason to limit it that it may be moderate, to the ende that it neither exceed the meane, nor come short and be defective: for that it cannot be chosen but this brutish and passible part hath motions in it; some overvehement, quicke and sudden, others as slow againe, and more slacke than is meet.” 71–76. 1736 highlights the series of contrasts between the attributes and operations of reason and self-love by italicization: their objects are nigh or at distance; concern immediate or future goods; are strong or watchful. *

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alex ander pope Reason still use, to Reason still attend: Attention, habit and experience gains, Each strengthens Reason, and Self-love restrains. Let subtle schoolmen teach these friends to fight, More studious to divide than to unite, And Grace and Virtue, Sense and Reason split, With all the rash dexterity of Wit: Wits, just like fools, at war about a Name, Have full as oft no meaning, or the same. Self-love and Reason to one end aspire, Pain their aversion, Pleasure their desire; But greedy that its object would devour, This taste the honey, and not wound the flow’r: 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; But since not every good we can divide, And reason bids us for our own provide; Passions, tho’ selfish, if their means be fair, List under Reason, and deserve her care; *

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78. 1736: “Reason still use, to reason still attend.” The marked emphasis draws the line toward human agency, what humans can do with reason, what they must do to be reasonable, as opposed to emphasizing the existence of a superindividual, abstract entity (reason) to which humans must submit. 83. MLM (LGA 236–37) and HLM (LGA 348–49) preserve various thoughts about the contrasts contained in these half lines. HLM places “Virtue” in superscript above “Nature.” 86. MLM (LGA 236–37) and HLM (348–49) both strike through a couplet, in HLM as “Too nice distinctions honest Sense will shun; / Know, Pleasure, Good, and Happiness are one.” This “one” is the “one end” referred to in II.87. 93. P: “�e Passions, and their Use.” 1736: “Modes of Self love the Passions we may call.” Italicization shifts topic from self-love to modes: it is the transformation of self-love in various guises that is of interest, not the fact that it expresses itself in passions. Modality rather than identity is foregrounded. 93–94. MLM (LGA 236–37) records stages through which this couplet was revised: “Modes of Self-love ye Passions tho we call, / Reason itself more nicely shares in all:” to “Modes of Selflove ye Passions tho if we ^ may call, / ’Tis Still But real Good, or seeming moves em all.” *

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a n essay on m a n Those, that imparted court a nobler aim, Exalt their kind, and take some Virtue’s name. In lazy Apathy let Stoics boast Their Virtue fix’d; ’tis fix’d as in a frost, Contracted all, retiring to the breast; But strength of mind is Exercise, not Rest: The rising tempest puts in act the soul, Parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole. On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail, Reason the card, but Passion is the gale;

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99. TE inserts a comma after “imparted,” MM taking the sense to be that passions, once imparted with reason, become exalted into virtues. James McLaverty’s study of the MSS, printed copies of the poem, and BL C.122.e.31 (which at II.99, p. 23, corrects to “Those which imparted, court a nobler aim”) demonstrates the sense to be that passions which are imparted to other people, rather than centered on the self, are exalted into virtues (see James McLaverty, “Warburton’s False Comma: Reason and Virtue in Pope’s Essay on Man,” Modern Philology 99:3 [February 2002]: 379–92). HLM (LGA 348–49) uses emphasis to connect imparted passions and virtues: “Those that imparted, court a nobler aim, / Exalt their Kind, and take some Virtue’s name.” That emphasis is retained in 1736 as italicization. 97–100. �e Works of George Savile Marquis of Halifax, ed. by Mark N. Brown, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), III,207–8, “Miscellanys”: “There can be no active vertue, but there must be a mixture of well regulated passion to give it life.” 101–2. Stoic moral theory does emphasize the importance of freeing the mind from the influence of the passions, but equally emphasizes a sense of benevolent connectedness to the rest of the creation (a facet of Stoic theory less commonly referred to by Pope’s contemporaries). �e Poems of John Oldham, ed. by Harold F. Brooks and Raman Selden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), “To the Memory of my Dear Friend, Mr. Charles Morwent,” stanza 16, lines 253–57: “Vain Stoicks who disclaim all Human Sense, / And own no Passions to resent Offence, / May pass it by with unconcern’d Neglect, / And Vertue on those Principles erect, / Where ’tis not a perfection, but Defect.” �e Works of Bishop Butler, ed. by David E. White (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), p. 75: “the apathy the Stoics talk of [ . . . ] supposes, or is accompanied with, somewhat amiss in the moral character, in that which is the health of the mind.” Voltaire in his copy of Works 1735 notes: “tout est faux dans cet ouvrage / le stoicien caton, le stoicien marc aurele languissaient ils dans une honteuse apathie?” “all is false in this work: the stoic Cato, the stoic Marcus Aurelius—did they languish in a shameful apathy?” 108. Card: “The circular piece of stiff paper on which the 32 points are marked in the mariner’s compass” (OED). MLM (LGA 238–39) and HLM (LGA 356–57) follow this line with a couplet struck through with diagonal slashes in both MSS, in HLM as “A tedious Voyage! where how useless lies  / The Compass, if no pow’rful Gust *

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alex ander pope Nor God alone in the still calm we find, He mounts the storm, and walks upon the wind. Passions, like Elements, tho’ born to fight, Yet, mix’d and soften’d, in his work unite: These ’tis enough to temper and employ; But what composes Man, can Man destroy? Suffice that Reason keep to Nature’s road, Subject, compound them, follow her and God. Love, Hope, and Joy, fair pleasure’s smiling train, Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of pain; These mix’d with art, and to due bounds confin’d, Make and maintain the balance of the mind: The lights and shades, whose well accorded strife 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, *

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arise?” The couplet suggests life is tedious and reason useless without strong passions. Plutarch, “Of Morall Vertue,” pp. 70, 77: “He termeth the judgement of reason, when it resisteth a dishonest act, by the name of Cable and Cordage; which notwithstanding afterwards may be broken by the violence of some passion (as it were) with the continuall gales of a blustring winde. [ . . . ] let passions be rid cleene away (if that were possible to be done) our reason will be found in many things more dull and idle: like as the pilot and master of a ship hath little to do, if the winde be laid and no gale stirring.” For a correspondence to Montaigne, “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde,” II,407–9, see introduction, pp. lxvi–lxvii. 110. 1736: “walks upon the Wind.” Italic confirms the citation of Ps. 104:3: “who walketh upon the wings of the wind.” 116. Following II.116, HLM (LGA 356–57) has the following couplet struck through diagonally: “The soft, reward the Virtuous, or invite, / The fierce, the Vicious punish, or affright:” The passions were regarded as a reward for virtue. 120. For a correspondence to Hutcheson, Essay, I.vi.3, pp. 120–21, see introduction, p. lxvii. 122. MLM (LGA 238–39) annotates, possibly with reference to the paragraph ending here, “Arist Eth. l.7.c.11 of ye mean reduces all ye Passions under Pleasure & Pain in their universal Principles The mean between opposit Passions makes Virtue, ye Extremes Vice.” Aristotle, Ethics, trans. by J.A.K. Thomson, ed. by Hugh Tredennick and Jonathan Barnes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 1152b4, p. 250: “moral virtue and vice are concerned with pains and pleasures.” The discussion at I.3, 1104b20, p. 96, is perhaps more relevant: “this kind of virtue disposes us to act in the best way with regard to pleasures and pains, and contrariwise with the corresponding vice.” *

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The whole employ of body and of mind. All spread their charms, but charm not all alike; On diff’rent senses diff’rent objects strike; Hence diff’rent Passions more or less inflame, As strong or weak, the organs of the frame; And hence one master Passion in the breast, Like Aaron’s serpent, swallows up the rest. As Man, perhaps, the moment of his breath, Receives the lurking principle of death; The young disease, that must subdue at length, Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength: So, cast and mingled with his very frame, *

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126. Montaigne, “That to Study Philosophy, is to Learn to Die,” I,102: “Pleasure is our end, though we make use of divers means to attain unto it.” 131. Mary Astell, “Letter VII,” in Letters Concerning the Love of God, Between the Author of the Proposal to the Ladies and Mr John Norris (London, 1695), p. 130: “I am not for a Stoical Apathy, I would not have my Hands and Feet cut off lest they should sometimes incommode me. The Fault is not in our Passions considered in themselves, but in our voluntary Misapplication and unsuitable Management of them. And if Love which is the leading and Master Passion were but once wisely regulated, our Passions would be so far from rebelling against and disquieting us, that on the contrary they would mightily facilitate the great Work we have to do, give Wings to this Earthly Body that presses down the Soul, and in a good Measure remove those Impediments that hinder her from mounting to the Original and End of her Being.” Note Pope’s echo of the lazy apathy of Stoics at II.101, and the emphasis on the passions as facilitating love of God. Benjamin Whichcote, Select Sermons (London, 1698), “Preface,” sig. a5r, of Hobbes: “in the place of other Affections, or good Inclinations, of whatever kind, this Author has substituted only one Master-Passion, Fear, which has, in effect, devour’d all the rest.” 131–32. Between the lines of this couplet MLM (LGA 238–39) and HLM (LGA 350–51) record a couplet struck through in both MSS, in HLM as “Nor here internal Faculties controul, / Nor Soul first on Body acts, but that on Soul.” The ruling passion allows the body to act on the soul, an unorthodox view. Voltaire in his copy of Works 1735 notes: “comparaison mal placee / et prise des sermons de / smalridge.” “badly placed comparison and taken from the sermons of Smalridge.” 132. P: “�e Predominant Passion, and its Force. The Use of this doctrine, as apply’d to the Knowledge of mankind, is one of the subjects of the second book.” See Prior, I,588, “Opinion,” “The Predominant Passion will appear thrô all the Disguise of Artifice and Hypocrisy.” In Exod. 7:8–12 God tells Aaron and Moses that Aaron should throw down his rod when Pharaoh demands to see a miracle. Aaron does so, and his rod becomes a serpent. Pharaoh’s magicians do the same and their rods also become serpents, “but Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods.” *

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alex ander pope 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. 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. Nature its mother, Habit is its nurse; Wit, Spirit, Faculties, but make it worse; Reason itself but gives it edge and pow’r; *

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138. For correspondences to Montaigne, “That we Laugh and Cry for the Same Thing,” I,420, and “Of the Inconstancy of our Actions,” II,2–3, see introduction, p. lxviii. The phrase already had a history in moral psychology before Pope. Madeleine de Scudéry, Conversations upon Several Subjects, trans. by Ferrand Spence (London, 1683), I,126–27, II,124, 168: “every one should say, which is the ruling Passion of his heart [ . . . ] his ruling Passion was the love he had for this Prince. [ . . . ] [of Alcibiades] Ambition is the ruling Passion of his soul [ . . . ] [of Socrates] knowledge of the Secrets of Nature is not his ruling Passion.” Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, An Essay on Translated Verse (London, 1694), p. 7: “Examine how your Humour is inclin’d,  / And which the Ruling Passion of your Mind.” Nicolas Malebranche, Father Malebranche his Treatise Concerning the Search after Truth, trans. by Thomas Taylor (London, 1700), V.iii, pp. 6, 8, uses the phrase “ruling passion” to refer to the passion currently dominant in the soul, as opposed to a predominant disposition: “at the appearance of that new Object, all this Order and Oeconomy is disturb’d, and most part of the Spirits are thrown into the Muscles of the Arms, Legs, Face, and other exteriour parts of the Body, to put them in a disposition suitable to the ruling Passion, and to give it such a gesture and motion, as are necessary for the obtaining or avoiding the imminent Good or Evil.” Chudleigh, p. 31, “The Ladies Defence,” line 553, encourages women to search their minds and “leave no Vice, no Ruling Passion there.” 123–44. The description of ruling passions, provided in the context of a quasimechanistic account of the effects of bodies on the soul, strongly recalls Lucretius’s account (III.307–22) of the composition of different kinds of human minds and their moral dispositions, Creech, III, p. 77: “So Mens minds differ too, tho moral rules / And Arts do polish, and reform our Souls, / Yet still some Seeds remain, they still appear / Thro all the Masks and Vizors we can wear, / Some small Remainders of the Primitive mind, / Some evil passions will be left behind; / Whence some are prone to rage, some to distrust, / Some fearful are, and some more mild than just.” 144. See Dryden, IV(1974),237, “Juvenal: Satyr X,” p. 371, line 490, where a husband taking revenge on an adulterer “Makes Colon suffer for the Peccant part.” 145–47. Nicolas Boileau, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. by Françoise Escal, intro. by Antoine Adam (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), Satire IV, pp. 28–29: “il faut le dire, / Souvent *

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As Heav’n’s blest beam turns vinegar more sowr; We, wretched subjects tho’ to lawful sway, In this weak queen, some fav’rite still obey. Ah! if she lend not arms, as well as rules, What can she more 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 The choice we make, or justify it made; Proud of an easy conquest all along, She but removes weak passions for the strong: So, when small humours gather to a gout, The doctor fancies he has driv’n them out. Yes, Nature’s road must ever be prefer’d; Reason is here no guide, but still a guard: ’Tis hers to rectify, not overthrow, And treat this passion more as friend than foe: A mightier Pow’r the strong direction sends, And sev’ral Men impels to sev’ral ends. Like varying winds, by other passions tost, This drives them constant to a certain coast. Let pow’r or knowledge, gold or glory, please, Or (oft more strong than all) the love of ease; Thro’ life ’tis follow’d, ev’n at life’s expence; The merchant’s toil, the sage’s indolence, The monk’s humility, the hero’s pride, †

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de tous nos maux la Raison est le pire.” �e Works of Monsieur Boileau, trans. by several hands, vol. 1 (London, 1712), p. 182 [printed as 128]: “what you Reason call, / Whatever Plagues we have’s the Worst of all.” 148. MM’s collation: “Between ll. 148–9, 1734a–35a have: ‘The ruling Passion, be it what it will, / The ruling Passion conquers Reason still.’ ” 159–60. MM cites Chambers’s article on gout: the contemporary medical understanding of the disease was that it was caused by superfluous humours (the fluids that make up the internal system of the body) gathering in an extremity. 165. P: “Its Necessity, in directing men to different purposes. The particular application of this to the several Pursuits of Men, and the General Good resulting thence, falls also into the succeeding books.” HLM (LGA 352–53) double underlines “mightier Pow’r,” emphasizing that this power is divine rather than natural, and that the passions are god-given. *

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alex ander pope All, all alike, find Reason on their side. Th’Eternal Art educing good from ill, Grafts on this Passion our best principle: ’Tis thus the Mercury of Man is fix’d, Strong grows the Virtue with his nature mix’d; The dross cements what else were too refin’d, And in one interest body acts with mind. As fruits ungrateful to the planter’s care On savage stocks inserted learn to bear; The surest Virtues thus from Passions shoot, Wild Nature’s vigor working at the root. What crops of wit and honesty appear From spleen, from obstinacy, hate, or fear! See anger, zeal and fortitude supply; Ev’n av’rice, prudence; sloth, philosophy; Lust, thro’ some certain strainers well refin’d, Is gentle love, and charms all womankind: Envy, to which th’ignoble mind’s a slave, *

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123–74. On reason siding with the stronger passions, see Wycherley, “A Collection of Maxims and Moral Reflections,” p. 46 (CXCVII): “It is very rare that Reason cures our Passions, but one Passion is cur’d by another; Reason generally places it self on the strongest Side, and therefore there can be no violent Passion, but has its Reason to authorize it.” 175. P: “Its providential use, in fixing our Principle, and ascertaining our Virtue.” 175–76. HLM (LGA 354–55) records the process of revision that shows good produced from ill, rather than mixed with it: “Th’Eternal Art, that mingles still educing Good with from Ill,  / Ev’n ^ And Grafts on this Passion our grafts ^ best our Principle.” Hutcheson, Inquiry, p. 133, II.iii.15, is closer than many other philosophers to Pope in admitting the possibility that passions can generate virtues: “I Know not for what Reason some will not allow that to be Virtue, which flows from Instincts, or Passions; but how do they help themselves? They say, ‘Virtue arises from Reason.’ What is Reason but that Sagacity we have in prosecuting any End?” 182. Manilius, II, p. 50, on Hesiod who among other things sings “How Foreign Graffs th’Adulterous Stock receives,  / Bears stranger Fruit, and wonders at her Leaves: / An useful Work, when Peace and Plenty reign, / And Art joyns Nature to improve the Plain.” Pope echoes the third line quoted in his earlier poem WindsorForest, line 42, TE I,152: “And Peace and Plenty tell, a Stuart reigns.” 189–90. Variation: “Left out in some Editions.” *

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Is emulation in the learn’d or brave: Nor Virtue, male or female, can we name, But what will grow on Pride, or grow on Shame. Thus Nature gives us (let it check our pride) The virtue nearest to our vice ally’d; Reason the byass turns to good from ill, And Nero reigns a Titus, if he will. The fiery soul abhor’d in Catiline, In Decius charms, in Curtius is divine. *

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191–92. MLM (LGA 240–41) and HLM (LGA 354–55) preserve an alternative version of this couplet, in HLM as “Envy, in Criticks and old Maids the Devil, / Is Emulation in the Learn’d and Civil,” with strikes through and superscript text bringing the couplet close to the current text. 194. MLM (LGA 240–41) and HLM (LGA 354–55) record four additional lines, struck through diagonally in both MSS, in HLM as “How oft with Passion Virtue points her charms! / Then shines the Hero, then the Beauty warms: / Peleus’ great Son, or Brutus, who had known,  / Had Lucrece been a Whore, or Helen none?” Fulvia’s name is scored through in favor of Lucrece in MLM. The lines suggest that uxoriousness may contribute to virtue. The language (virtue as feminine, possessing charms, the beauty warming presumably with a glow of virtue) confuses passion and virtue. 195. P: “Virtue and Vice join’d in our Mixt Nature; the Limits near, yet the things separate, and evident. �e Office of Reason.” 195–96. MLM (LGA 242–43) follows these lines with a rejected couplet: “But Virtues opposite to make agree / That, Reason! were is thy Work Task , & worthy thee.” In MLM the couplet is followed by a brief passage portraying stock characters who lack either reason or resolution to identify and follow the appropriate course of action. See Boileau, Satire IV, p. 27: “Chacun [ . . . ]  / De ses propres defauts se fait une vertu.” �e Works of Monsieur Boileau, vol. 1, p. 178: “His Folly, as a Vertue, each maintains.” 199. Dryden, II(1972),10, Absalom and Achitophel, lines 152–58, describes Achitophel as “For close Designs, and crooked Counsells fit; / Sagacious, Bold, and Turbulent of wit: / Restless, unfixt in Principles and Place; / In Power unpleas’d, impatient of Disgrace: / A fiery Soul, which working out its way, / Fretted the Pigmy Body to decay: / And o’r inform’d the Tenement of Clay.” The phrase “fiery soul” is also frequent in tragedy of the early eighteenth century, with characters recognizing the fire of their own souls. 198–200. Nero (ad 37–68) was emperor of Rome ad 54–68, and was associated with self-indulgence, indifference to the empire, and persecuting Christians. Titus Flavius Vespasianus (ad 39–81) was emperor between ad 79 and 81, and regarded as clement. Gaius Messius Quintus Traianus Decius (c. 190–251) was emperor 249–51. Although his reign is marked by persecution of Christians, it seems he is named here *

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alex ander pope The same ambition can destroy or save, And makes a patriot as it makes a knave. IV. This light and darkness in our chaos join’d, What shall divide? The God within the mind. Extremes in Nature equal ends produce, In Man they join to some mysterious use; Tho’ each by turns the other’s bound invade, As, in some well-wrought picture, light and shade, And oft so mix, the diff’rence is too nice Where ends the Virtue, or begins the Vice. Fools! who from hence into the notion fall, That Vice or Virtue there is none at all. *

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for his reputation for undertaking personal risk for the sake of the empire, challenging military incursion. M. Curtius is supposed to have ridden, armed, into a gulf that opened up in the Forum, in obedience to an oracle and in order to preserve Rome. For Catiline, see I.156n. 203–4. MLM (LGA 242–43): “ darkness in thy chaos joind / Tis Reasons task to seprate in the mind.” HLM (LGA 358–59): “This light & darkness in thy our Chaos joind, Divide before the Genius of ye mind,” then moving on to II.197, so that “Reason” appears a substantiation of the genius of the mind. A further revision on this MS page of HLM arrives at “The God within our Mind.” Warburton glosses “The God within the mind” as a “Platonic phrase for Conscience” in a note to 1743b. 205–6. Epistle to Bathurst, lines 161–64, TE III.ii,104: “Hear then the Truth: ‘’Tis Heav’n each Passion sends, / ‘And diff ’rent men directs to diff ’rent ends. / ‘Extremes in Nature equal good produce, / ‘Extremes in Man concur to gen’ral use.’ ” 205–10. �e Works of George Savile Marquis of Halifax, I,239, �e Character of a Trimmer: “A Prince that hath exhausted himselfe by his Liberality, and endangered himselfe by his mercy: Who out shineth by his own Light and by his natural virtues all the varnish of studied acquisitions. His faults are like shades to a good Picture, or like Allay to Gold to make it the more usefull.” See also III,295, “Miscellanys”: “There is hardly a vertue that is not mixt with a vice nor a vice that has not the tincture of a vertue. [ . . . ] The differences between vices and vertues are so nice, they cannot discern them, there being so many mixtures to deceive them on both hands.” Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, IV. 135–38: “Thus though sin in itself be ill, ’tis good  / That sin should be, for thereby rectitude  / Thorough opposed iniquity, as light / By shades, is more conspicuous and more bright.” Berkeley, Principles, p. 208: “We shou’d further consider, that the very Blemishes and Defects of Nature are not without their Use, in that they make an agreeable sort of Variety, and augment the Beauty of the rest of the Creation, as Shades in a Picture serve to set off the brighter and more enlighten’d Parts.” *

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If white and black blend, soften, and unite A thousand ways, is there no black or white? Ask your own heart, and nothing is so plain; ’Tis to mistake them, costs the time and pain. V. Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, As, to be hated, needs but to be seen; Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace. 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, But thinks his neighbour farther gone than he. Ev’n those who dwell beneath its very zone, *

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213. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, line 488, TE I,294: “When the ripe Colours soften and unite.” 216. MLM (LGA 242–43) and HLM (LGA 358–61) record some lines offering general and particular compressed satiric portraits demonstrating the weakness of human resolve in the face of particular vices. The passage in HLM (LGA 360–61) concludes with the deleted couplet “In ev’ry lesser Vice, Faults at first, in some degree, / We see some Virtue, or we think we see.” 217. P: “Vice odious in itself, and how we deceive ourselves into it.” 217–18. Dryden, III(1969),124, �e Hind and the Panther, I.33–34: “For truth has such a face and such a meen / As to be lov’d needs onely to be seen.” 220. HLM (LGA 360–61) records some lines exemplifying vices, and attributing them to individual and generic characters. This is a section of the poem, then, for which Pope considered and rejected less abstract satirical passages. 1733 has “A Cheat! a Whore! who starts not at the Name, / In all the Inns of Court, or Drury Lane?” Pope records these lines in his 1735 variations. 223–24. Orcades: the Orkney islands, northeast of mainland Scotland. Zembla: Novaya Zembla, an island off the north coast of Russia in the Arctic Ocean. 225. MLM (LGA 242–43) presents various earlier thoughts for the line: “ No mortal Not one^ will owns^ share Vice it in the first supreme degree.” (MM does not transcribe “share.”) There follows a further rejected passage of satirical illustration, with everyone involved in criminal justice thinking somebody else the rogue, a version of which is also found in HLM (LGA 362–63). 221–26. Donne, “To Sir Henry Wotton,” p. 264, lines 7–9: “For here no one is from the’extremitie / Of vice, by any other reason free, / But that the next to’him, still, is worse than hee.” Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 9–10, TE I,239–40: “’Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none / Go just alike, yet each believes his own.” *

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alex ander pope Or never feel the rage, or never own; What happier natures shrink at with affright, The hard inhabitant contends is right. VI. Virtuous and vicious ev’ry Man must be, Few in th’extreme, but all in the degree; The rogue and fool by fits is fair and wise, And ev’n the best, by fits, what they despise. ’Tis but by parts we follow good or ill, For, Vice or Virtue, Self directs it still; Each individual seeks a sev’ral goal; But Heav’n’s great view is One, and that the Whole: That counter-works each folly and caprice; That disappoints th’effect of ev’ry vice: That happy frailties to all ranks apply’d,

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230. MLM (LGA 244–45) contains the couplet struck through: “Thus In spite of all the Frenchmans witty lies / Most Vices seem are but Virtues in disguise.” There are versions of the couplet in a section struck through on the shoulder of the recto of the same folio (f. 4, labeled “6” in the MS) (“And (spite of all the Frenchmans witty lies) / Our Vices still are but Virtues in disguise”), in material that led on to I.221. MM (LGA 308) identifies the Frenchman as Rochefoucauld. 231. P: “�e Ends of Providence and General Good answer’d in our Passions and Imperfections. How usefully these are distributed to all Orders of men.” 232. Rochester, “Against Reason and Mankind,” lines 169–71: “Most men are Cowards, all men should be Knaves. / The difference lies, as farr as I can see, / Not in the thing it self, but the degree.” 235. HLM (LGA 362–63) records an interlineated couplet, struck through: “Some Virtue in a Lawyer has been known, / Nay in a Minister, nay or on a Throne.” 238. MLM (LGA 244–45) adds a shoulder note here: “The Ends of Providence & Human Happiness, answerd in all this our Passions, & very our very our imperfections.” There are further notes on the same page under the rubric “Particular instances,” linked to passages in the printed text as follows: II.241, “How useful to different orders of men. That proper frailties &c Shame—&c”; II.249, “To Society”; II.263, “To ye Individuals [In evry state see some strange comfort &c”; II.273, “To Passions ye happiness of and to in evry part of Life.” 240. MLM (LGA 244–45) records various thoughts for this line: “And public Good extracts from private Vice” is struck through, with “That draws some Virtue out of evry Vice” remaining above. HLM (LGA 362–63) says this of “Heav’ns great View”: “That counter-works our each Folly and Caprice; / That draws disappoints a Virtue th’Effect out of ev’ry Vice; / All forms of Good thro’ That and Virtues Ends from Vanity conveys can raise , / Which seeks no int’rest, no reward but Praise”. The final couplet becomes II.245–46. Pope seems to be saying that unintended consequences can be virtues. *

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Shame to the virgin, 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, Which seeks no int’rest, no reward but praise; And build on wants, and on defects of mind, The joy, the peace, the glory of Mankind. Heav’n forming each on other to depend, A master, or a servant, or a friend, 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, Each home-felt joy that life inherits here: Yet from the same we learn, in its decline, Those joys, those loves, those int’rests to resign: Taught half by Reason, half by mere decay, To welcome death, and calmly pass away. Whate’er the Passion, knowledge, fame, or pelf, Not one will change his neighbour with himself. The learn’d is happy nature to explore, The fool is happy that he knows no more; The rich is happy in the plenty giv’n, The poor contents him with the care of Heav’n. See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,

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249. P: “How useful these are to Society in general, and to Individuals in particular, in every State, 250 [To welcome death, and calmly pass away.]. and ev’ry Age of Life, 260 [Supremely blest, the Poet in his muse.].” 262. HLM (LGA 364–65) uses contrasts between Ross and Argyle, Toland and Locke to illustrate human preference for one’s own over one’s neighbor’s position, presumably arguing that Toland should objectively want to be Locke. The contrast is also between the Macdonalds and the Campbells, the Macdonalds massacred by the Campbells at Glencoe in 1692 (LGA 417). Pope tries two different versions of the second line of the couplet: “What partly pleases, totally will shock, / I question much if Toland would be Lock, / Nor Ross wd be Argyle nor Toland Locke.” The first line of the couplet is a near inversion of IV.141. For a correspondence to Erasmus, p. 35, see introduction, p. lxix. Horace, Satires, I.i.15–19, where people complain that others’ situations are better than their own, but wouldn’t change if offered the chance. *

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alex ander pope The sot a hero, lunatic a king; The starving chemist in his golden views Supremely blest, the poet in his muse. See some strange comfort ev’ry state attend, And Pride bestow’d on all, a common friend; See some fit Passion ev’ry age supply, Hope travels thro’, nor quits us when we die. Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law, Pleas’d with a rattle, tickled with a straw: Some livelier play-thing gives his youth delight, A little louder, but as empty quite: Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage; And beads and pray’r-books are the toys of age: Pleas’d with this bauble still, as that before; ’Till tir’d he sleeps, and Life’s poor play is o’er! *

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269–70. Montaigne, “Of the Affection of Fathers to their Children. To Madam D’Estissac,” II,122: “according to Aristotle, the Poet, of all sorts of Artificers, is the fondest of his work.” Malebranche, Search after Truth, V.vii, p. 25: “For Instance, When Poetry, History, Chymistry, or any other Humane Science has struck the Imagination of a young Man with some Motions of Admiration, if he do not carefully watch the Attempt these Motions make upon his Mind, if he examine not to the bottom the Use of those Sciences, if he compare not the Trouble of learning them with the Benefits that may accrue to him; in short, if he be not as nice in his Judgment as he ought to be, he runs the hazard of being seduced by his Admiration, shewing him only the fairest Part of those Sciences; and ’tis even to be feared, lest they should so far corrupt his Heart, as that he should never awake out of his Dream, even when he comes to know it to be but a Dream; because it is not possible to blot out of the Brain deep Tracks, engraven and widened by a long-continued Admiration.” 275. HLM (LGA 364–65) has “Nature’s lucky law.” The revision suggests a less contingent, more benevolent nature, which perhaps shares its nature (kind) with humans. 279. Scarf: “Ecclesiastical. A band of silk or other material worn round the neck, with the two ends pendent from the shoulders in front, as a part of clerical costume. In the 18th. c. spec. the scarf worn by a nobleman’s chaplain; hence, a chaplaincy” (OED). Garter: “the Garter, the badge of the highest order of English knighthood. Hence, membership of this order” (OED). 275–82. This verse paragraph is added in 1743b. The changing amusements or deceptions appropriate to each stage of life are a common topic. Seneca, “Of Firmness,” I,83–85, saying those that attempt to injure the wise are like children: “For while children are greedy for knuckle-bones, nuts, and coppers, these are greedy for gold and silver, and cities; while children play among themselves at being magistrates, and *

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Mean-while Opinion gilds with varying rays Those painted clouds that beautify our days; Each want of happiness by Hope supply’d, And each vacuity of sense by Pride: These build as fast as knowledge can destroy; In Folly’s cup still laughs the bubble, joy; One prospect lost, another still we gain; And not a vanity is giv’n in vain; Ev’n mean Self-love becomes, by force divine, The scale to measure others wants by thine.

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in make-believe have their bordered toga, lictors’ rods and tribunal, these play in earnest at the same things in the Campus Martius and the forum and the senate; while children rear their toy houses on the sea-shore with heaps of sand, these, as though engaged in a mighty enterprise, are busied in piling up stones and walls and roofs, and convert what was intended as a protection to the body into a menace. Therefore children and those who are farther advanced in life are alike deceived, but the latter in different and more serious things.” Rochester, “Against Reason and Mankind,” lines 212–15 of a doting bishop, “A greater Fopp in business at Fourscore, / Fonder of serious Toyes, affected more  / Than the gay glittering Fool at twenty proves, / With all his Noise, his tawdry Clothes and Loves.” The combined reference to the toys of age and the theatrical metaphor for life recalls Creech’s Lucretius, III, p. 97, telling the old not to resent approaching death: “Yet leave these toyes, that not befit thine age, / New Actors now come on; resign the Stage.” Hutcheson, Essay, I.v.2, p. 90: “We once knew the time when an Hobby-Horse, a Top, a Rattle, was sufficient Pleasure to us. We grow up, we now relish Friendships, Honour, good Offices, Marriage, Offspring, serving a Community or Country. [ . . . ] ‘Our Nature determines us to certain Pursuits in our several Stages; and following her Dictates, is the only way to our Happiness.[’]” 286. HLM (LGA 364–65) records a revision to an earlier version of this line that might have suggested faith was merely supplementary: “Of Certainty by Faith, & each Vacuity of Sense by Pride.” Pope, “Peri Bathous,” in Miscellanies: �e Last Volume (London, 1727), p. 58: “The Macrology and Pleonasm, are as generally coupled, as a lean Rabbit with a fat one; nor is it a wonder, the Superfluity of Words and Vacuity of Sense, being just the same thing.” 290. Rochester, “Artemiza to Chloe,” lines 252–53: “Nature, who never made a thinge in vayne, / But does each Insect to some ende ordeyne.” 292. P: “See farther, of the Use of this Principle in Man. Epist. 3. ver. 121[Each loves itself, but not itself alone,], 124[They love themselves, a third time, in their race.], 135[At once extend the int’rest, and the love:], 145[That pointed back to youth, this on to age;], 200[Great Nature spoke; observant men obey’d;] &c. 270[So drives Self-Love, thro’ just and thro’ unjust,], &c. 316[Thus God and Nature link’d the gen’ral frame], &c. And Epist. 4. ver. 348[In one close system of Benevolence], and *

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alex ander pope See! and confess, one comfort still must rise, ’Tis this, Tho’ Man’s a fool, yet God is wise.

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358[His country next, and next all human-race].” This extended set of enchained passages suggests the importance of social and psychological mechanisms for internalizing others’ needs for Pope’s system. Malebranche is skeptical about the use of our own faculties to judge of others’ experience, Search after Truth, III.vii, p. 124: “when the Body is a partner in that which occurrs within me, I am almost ever deceiv’d, if I measure others by my self. I feel Heat, I see a thing of such a Size, or such a Colour; I have such or such a Tast, upon the application of certain Bodies to my Palate: and I am deceiv’d, if I judge of others by my self: I am subject to particular Passions, I have a kindness or aversion to this or that thing, and I judge that others have the like: but my Conjecture is often false.” The expected apostrophe (others’) is missing in the copy text. 294. 1736: “tho’ Man’s a fool, yet God is wise.” The marking of emphasis echoes the closing couplet of the first epistle, with the transition from roman to italic to initial capital and small caps. *

EPISTLE III A RG U M E N T.

Of the Nature and State of Man, with respect to Society. I. TH E whole Universe one system of Society, Ver. 7, &c. Nothing made wholly for itself, nor yet wholly for another, Ver. 27. �e happiness of Animals mutual, Ver. 49. II. Reason or Instinct operate alike to the good of each Individual, Ver. 79. Reason or Instinct operate also to Society, in all animals, Ver. 109. III. 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. 147. Reason instructed by Instinct in the invention of Arts, Ver. 171, and in the Forms of Society, Ver. 179. V. Origin of Political Societies, Ver. 199. Origin of Monarchy, Ver. 209. Patriarchal government, Ver. 215. VI. Origin of true Religion and Government, from the same principle, of Love, Ver. 231, &c. Origin of Superstition and Tyranny, from the same principle, of Fear, Ver. 241, &c. �e 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. Mixt Government, Ver. 294. Various Forms of each, and the true end of all, Ver. 303, &c. *

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E R E then we rest: “The Universal Cause “Acts to one end, but acts by various laws.” In all the madness of superfluous health, The trim of pride, the impudence of wealth,

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alex ander pope Let this great truth be present night and day; But most be present, if we preach or pray. I. Look round our World; behold the chain of Love Combining all below and all above. See plastic Nature working to this end, The single atoms each to other tend, Attract, attracted to, the next in place Form’d and impell’d its neighbour to embrace. See Matter next, with various life endu’d, Press to one centre still, the gen’ral Good.

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IV,63: “Then, like the Sun, let Bounty spread her ray, / And shine that Superfluity away. / Oh Impudence of wealth! with all thy store, / How dar’st thou let one worthy man be poor?” 9. MLM (LGA 256–57): “See lifeless matter moving to one End.” Also at HLM (LGA 374–75). Retained in 1733 and recorded in Pope’s variations of 1735. Plastic nature is creation seen as purposive. The term is sometimes contrasted to, sometimes identified with, providence or divine intelligence. The identification is in danger of Stoic or deist heterodoxy. For God as the soul of the world, see I.268 and n. Robert Day, Free �oughts in Defence of a Future State (London, 1700), p. 99: “that wild fancy of corrupted Stoicism, which supposes the World to be one huge Plant or Vegetable, having a plastic Nature, orderly disposing the whole without Mind or Understanding.” Richard Brocklesby, An Explication of the Gospel-theism and the Divinity of the Christian Religion (London, 1706), p. 531: “There is an appearance therefore that the Mosaic Spirit of God signifieth a Plastick Nature or a Soul of the World, such as some Writers of the Church seem to suppose, then they affirm, �at a Divine Spirit containing all things is every where diffus’d, that the Earth of it self doth not generate Animals, nothing is generated without the Spirit of God.” Charles Gildon, A New Rehearsal, or Bays the Younger (London, 1714), p. 4, where Truewit says of the true poet that he is “a second Maker, like that Sovereign Artist or Universal Plastic Nature, he forms a WHOLE, Coherent and Proportion’d in it self.” John Auther, “The Weakness of our Faculties, or the Uncertainty and Deficiency of Human Knowledge,” p. 47: “Shew how the vegetable Tribes arise, / How plastic Nature draws the kindly Juice, / And thro’ the straitned Tubes does liquid store diffuse.” George Berkeley, Alciphron (Dublin, 1732), p. 122, of Marcus Aurelius: “among all his magnificent Lessons and splendid Sentiments, upon the Force and Beauty of Virtue, he is positive as to the Being of God, and that not merely as a plastic Nature, or Soul of the World, but in the strict Sense of a Providence inspecting and taking care of Human Affairs.” 7–14. Texts P may have or did know present the creation as a chain of love. Boethius, II.viii, p. 38: “The power that constrains this chain / Of nature’s orderings is Love. / Love governs lands and seas alike, / Love orders too the heavens above.” John Owen, A Continuation of the Exposition of the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews (London, 1680), p. 100: “All things were at first made in a state of Love. That Recti*

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tude, Order, Peace and Harmony which was in the whole Creation was an Impression from, and an Expression of the Love of God. [ . . . ] When man by sin had broken the first link of this Chain of Love, when thereby we lost the Love of God to us, and renounced our own Love unto him, all things fell into disorder and confusion in the whole Creation.” Anon., “A Congratulatory Poem on his Sacred Majesty James the Second’s Succession to the Crown,” in Miscellanea: Or, the Second Part of Poetical Recreations (London, 1688), p. 93, offers an irenic vision of life under James II, including a vision of peace and plenty viewed by the Thames, and an end to faction (the poem is therefore a possible source for Windsor-Forest as much as for the Essay): “link’d together in one Chain of Love,  / And with one Spring Unanimous we’ll move.” Dryden, VII(2000),187–89, “Palamon and Arcite,” III.1024–33, 1040–49: “The Cause and Spring of Motion, from above  / Hung down on Earth the Golden Chain of Love: / Great was th’ Effect, and high was his Intent, / When Peace among the jarring Seeds he sent. / Fire, Flood, and Earth, and Air by this were bound, / And Love, the common Link, the new Creation crown’d. / The Chain still holds; for though the Forms decay,  / Eternal Matter never wears away:  / The same First Mover certain Bounds has plac’d, / How long those perishable Forms shall last; [ . . . ] Then since those Forms begin, and have their End, / On some unalter’d Cause they sure depend: / Parts of the Whole are we; but God the Whole; / Who gives us Life, and animating Soul.  / For Nature cannot from a Part derive  / That Being, which the Whole can only give: / He perfect, stable; but imperfect We, / Subject to Change, and diff ’rent in Degree; / Plants, Beasts, and Man; and as our Organs are, / We more or less of his Perfection share.” 13–14. Enduing matter with life is contentious and again evokes the possibility of Spinozism. Ralph Cudworth, �e True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678), pp. 136–37, argues that if matter is the origin of all things, it must either be dead or have merely plastic life: “those who make Matter endued with a Plastick Life, to be the first Original of all things, must needs suppose either One such Plastick and Spermatick Life only, in the whole Mass of Matter or Corporeal Universe, which are the Stoical Atheists; or else all Matter as such to have Life and an Energetick Nature belonging to it.” Conyers Place, An Essay Towards the Vindication of the Visible Creation Book II (London, 1729), p. 31, reports Samuel Clarke’s feeling that it is absurd to attribute consciousness to matter, one of “those numberless Absurdities that follow from the monstrous Supposition of Matter being endued with Life and Perception.” Henry Felton, �e Christian Faith Asserted Against Deists, Arians, and Socinians in Eight Sermons (Oxford, 1732), p. 334, regards it as “Spinoza’s Hypothesis” that “God is supposed to be nothing but Matter endued with Life and Intelligence.”

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alex ander pope Nothing is foreign: Parts relate to whole; One all-extending, all-preserving Soul Connects each being, greatest with the least; Made Beast in aid of Man, and Man of Beast; All serv’d, all serving! nothing stands alone; The chain holds on, and where it ends, unknown. Has God, thou fool! work’d solely for thy good, Thy joy, thy pastime, thy attire, thy food? Who for thy table feeds the wanton fawn, For him as kindly spread the flow’ry lawn. 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 swell the note: The bounding steed you pompously bestride, 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: The hog, that plows not nor obeys thy call, Lives on the labours of this lord of all. Know, Nature’s children all divide her care; The fur that warms a monarch, warm’d a bear. *

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While Man exclaims, “See all things for my use!” “See man for mine!” replies a pamper’d goose; And just as short of Reason he must fall, Who thinks all made for one, not one for all. Grant that the pow’rful still the weak controul, Be Man the Wit and Tyrant of the whole: Nature that Tyrant checks; he only knows, And helps, another creature’s wants and woes. Say, will the falcon, stooping from above, Smit with her varying plumage, spare the dove? Admires the jay the insect’s gilded wings? Or hears the hawk when Philomela sings? *

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27–46. Montaigne, “An Apology for Raimond de Sebonde,” II,218, 348–49: “they who make so much of Beasts, ought rather to be said to serve them, than to be served by them. [ . . . ] why may not a Goose say thus, All the parts of the Universe I have an Interest in, the Earth serves me to walk upon, the Sun to light me, the Stars have their Influence upon me: I have such Advantage by the Winds, and such Conveniences by the Waters: There is nothing that yond heavenly Roof looks upon so favourably as me; I am the Darling of Nature? Is it not Man that treats, lodges and serves me? ’Tis for me that he both sows and grinds: If he eates me, he does the same by his fellow Man, and so do I the Worms that kill and devour him.” Prior, I,326, Solomon, I.549–54: “But do these Worlds display their Beams, or guide / Their Orbs, to serve thy Use, to please thy Pride? / Thy self but Dust, thy Stature but a Span, / A Moment thy Duration; foolish Man! / As well may the minutest Emmet say, / That Caucasus was rais’d, to pave his Way”. Pope is beginning Epistle III with an approach to the problem of evident inequality for the supposed justice of the creator. At various points, on various grounds, throughout the epistle, Pope asserts that individuals are made for the whole, rather than the reverse. The argument here seems to be that all luxuries and privileges are in fact provided for the use of some other. But the context is disturbing, as it suggests that the prideful creature in a lower position is to be consumed by a creature in a higher position. This idea is also present in the paragraph ending III.70. 45–46. HLM (LGA 372–73) presents this couplet as the opening of Epistle III, followed by the lines “What care to lodge tend , to cram, to tend lodge , to treat him, / All this he saw, but not that ’twas to eat him.” The feminine double rhyme sounds a vulgarization of the subject. These, and two further lines (“As far as Goose could judge, he reason’d right, / But as to Man, mistook the Matter quite;”), appear in 1733–34b (TE). Pope records the omission of the second of the two couplets in his variations of 1735. 56. Philomela: the nightingale. Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, describes the transformation of Philomela into that bird following her rape and the removal of her tongue by Tereus. *

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alex ander pope 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: All feed on one vain Patron, and enjoy Th’extensive blessing of his luxury. That very life his learned hunger craves, He saves from famine, from the savage saves; Nay, feasts the animal he dooms his feast, And, ’till he ends the being, makes it blest; Which sees no more the stroke, or feels the pain, Than favour’d Man by touch etherial slain. The creature had his feast of life before; Thou too must perish, when thy feast is o’er! 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 As, while he dreads it, makes him hope it too: The hour conceal’d, and so remote the fear, Death still draws nearer, never seeming near. Great standing miracle! that Heav’n assign’d Its only thinking thing this turn of mind. *

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59–60. The reasons given for man providing for animals (interest, pleasure, pride) are not significantly different from those Pope gives for familial love in animals and humans, III.121–46, where self-love causes people to love one another and their children, and interest causes children to care for their parents. 68. P: “Several of the Ancients, and many of the Orientals at this day, esteem’d those who were struck by Lightning as sacred Persons, and the particular Favourites of Heaven.” John Milton, Samson Agonistes, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. by John Carey (London: Longman, 1968), line 549: “touch ætherial of Heav’n’s fiery rod.” 69. Chudleigh, “To Clorissa,” lines 20–25, p. 68: “When all alone [ . . . ] / I freely can with my own Thoughts converse, / And cloath them in ignoble Verse, / ’Tis then I tast the most delicious Feast of Life.” 77. Pope’s use of the phrase “standing miracle” to describe simultaneous knowledge of mortality and imaginative deferral of its date is typical of the relationship between the language of the poem and that of major theological and philosophical works that Pope knew or may have known. Pope frequently adopts a phrase from these works and applies it to a slightly surprising, adjacent subject. Here is a selection of texts in which the common phrase “standing miracle” occurs and the objects to which it is applied: Jeremy Taylor, Antiquitates christianæ (London, 1675), p. 140, of a *

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II. Whether with Reason, or with Instinct blest, Know, all enjoy that pow’r which suits them best; 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 can they need beside? Reason, however able, cool at best, Cares not for service, or but serves when prest, Stays ’till we call, and then not often near; But honest Instinct comes a volunteer; Sure never to o’er-shoot, but just to hit, While still too wide or short is human Wit; Sure by quick Nature happiness to gain, Which heavier Reason labours at in vain. This too serves always, Reason never long; One must go right, the other may go wrong. See then the acting and comparing pow’rs One in their nature, which are two in ours, And Reason raise o’er Instinct as you can, In this ’tis God directs, in that ’tis Man.

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perpetually burning lamp in the tomb of St. Thomas; John Scott, �e Christian Life, 2 vols. (London, 1685), I,108, of the world; Monsieur Pascall’s �oughts [ . . . ] together with a Discourse on Monsieur Pascall’s �oughts, trans. by Joseph Walker (London, 1688), p. 320, from the “Discourse,” of the accomplishment of prophecies; Thomas Burnet, �e �eory of the Earth (London, 1697), p. 205, of the incarnation of spiritual substance; �e Works of John Locke, Esq, 3 vols. (London, 1714), III,453, of the evangelical success of the gospel wherever it is known; �e Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, 4 vols. (London, 1721), IV,585, of the courage of early Christian martyrs; Francis Atterbury, Sermons and Discourses on Several Subjects and Occasions, 2 vols. (London, 1730), I,154, of the success of the gospel. Pope turns vocabulary already broadly and variously used to new objects. 79. P: “Reason or Instinct alike operate to the good of each Individual, and they operate also to Society, in all Animals.” 84. After this line HLM (LGA 378–79) inserts two couplets, both marked “Dr A.”: “While Man with opening Views of various ways, / Confounded by ye aid of Knowledge strays.” “Too weak to chuse, yet chusing still in hast, / One moment gives ye Pleasure & distaste.” MM notes (LGA 191) that the second couplet appears in John Arbuthnot’s Know Your Self (London, 1734). 89–92. These lines are added in 1743b. 89–98. Plutarch, “That Brute Beasts Have Use of Reason,” passim, and pp. 564, 569: “You grant then and confesse already, That the soule of brute beasts is by nature *

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alex ander pope Who taught the nations of the field and wood To shun their poison, and to chuse their food? Prescient, the tides or tempests to withstand, Build on the wave, or arch beneath the sand? Who made the spider parallels design, Sure as De-moivre, without rule or line? Who bid the stork, Columbus-like, explore Heav’ns not his own, and worlds unknown before? Who calls the council, states the certain day, Who forms the phalanx, and who points the way?

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more kinde, more perfect and better disposed to yeeld vertue, considering that without compulsion, without commandment, or any teaching, which is as much to say, as without tillage and sowing it bringeth forth and nourisheth that vertue which is meet and convenient for every one. [ . . . ] the wisedome of beasts [ . . . ] giveth place to no arte whatsoever, that is vaine and needlesse; and as for those that be necessarie, it entertaineth them not as comming from others, nor as taught by mercenarie masters for hire and money; neither is it required, that it should have any exercise to glue (as it were, and joine after a slender maner) each rule, principle and proposition. [ . . . ] For if you say (as the trueth is) that nature is the schoole-mistresse, teaching them all this, you referre and educe the wisedome and intelligence of dumbe beasts unto the sagest and most perfect cause or principle that is; which if you think you may not call reason, nor prudence, ye ought then to seeke out some other name for it, that is better and more honourable.” Plutarch, “Of Eating Flesh II,” p. 577: “a soule endued with sense, with seeing, hearing, apprehension, understanding, witte and discretion, such as nature hath given to each living creature, [is] sufficient to seeke and get that which is good for it, and likewise to avoid and shun whatsoever is hurtfull and contrary unto it.” Prior, I,317, Solomon, I.235–36: “Instinct and Reason how can we divide? / ’Tis the Fool’s Ign’rance, and the Pedant’s Pride.” 102. MM sees the nesting habits of the halcyon and kingfisher alluded to here. 104. Abraham de Moivre (1667–1754), a Huguenot, fled from France to England in the 1680s where he befriended Newton and Halley. He was elected to the Royal Society and contributed to the fields of trigonometry and probability. MLM (LGA 260–61) contains a rejected passage that also compares Christopher Wren (1632–1723, architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and also credited with many mathematical advances), James Gibbs (1682–1754, architect of St. Mary-le-Strand church, and regarded as a fashionable architect in Walpole’s time), and Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680, architect of the colonnade forming the piazza in front of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and sculptor) unfavorably to animal architects driven by instinct. The woodlark is said to sing as sweetly as the Venetian soprano castrato Matteo Berselli (fl. 1708–21), yet without having lost its stones, a comparison that leads MM to suggest (LGA 196) the passage was cut for being low. *

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III. God, in the nature of each being, founds Its proper bliss, and sets its proper bounds: But as he fram’d a Whole, the Whole to bless, On mutual Wants built mutual Happiness: So from the first eternal Order ran, And creature link’d to creature, man to man. Whate’er of life all-quick’ning æther keeps, Or breathes thro’ 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, 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. Thus beast and bird their common charge attend, The mothers nurse it, and the sires defend; The young dismiss’d to wander earth or air, There stops the Instinct, and there ends the care;

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112. MLM (LGA 262–63) and HLM (LGA 382–83) record lines (a version of III.317–18) inserted here, in HLM as “He rais’d From private Sparkles, ^ rais’d the gen’ral Flame / And bade Self-love and Social be the same.” 115. P: “How far Society carry’d by Instinct.” 121–22. MLM (LGA 262–63) adds a shoulder note here: “Foundation of Society.” 115–24. HLM (LGA 384–85) records matter relating to this passage that perhaps makes the physical impulse to love more palpable: “Quick with this Spirit, new-born Nature mov’d; / Each first admir’d its being, then it Itself each Creature in its Species lov’d; / Each sought a Pleasure not possest alone; / Each Sex desir’d alike, and Two were One.” “This Impulse animates; one Nature feeds / The vital Lamp, and swells the genial Seeds; / All spread their Image, wth like ardour stung; / All love themselves, reflected in their young.” MLM (LGA 266–67) records similar material. 123–24. Bacon, Advancement, p. 140: “there is impressed vppon all things a triple desire or appetite proceeding from loue to themselues; one of preseruing and contynuing theyr form, another of Aduancing and Perfitting their fourm and a third of Multiplying and extending their fourme vpon other things: whereof the multiplying or signature of it vpon other things, is that which we handled by the name of Actiue good.” *

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alex ander pope The link dissolves, each seeks a fresh embrace, Another love succeeds, another race. A longer care Man’s helpless kind demands; That longer care contracts more lasting bands: Reflection, Reason, still the ties improve, At once extend the int’rest, and the love; With choice we fix, with sympathy we burn; Each Virtue in each Passion takes its turn; And still new needs, new helps, new habits rise, That graft benevolence on charities. Still as one brood, and as another rose, Those nat’ral love maintain’d, habitual those: The last, scarce ripen’d into perfect Man, Saw helpless him from whom their life began: Mem’ry and fore-cast just returns engage, That pointed back to youth, this on to age; While pleasure, gratitude, and hope, combin’d, Still spread the int’rest, and preserv’d the kind. *

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129. Jeremy Taylor, XXV Sermons Preached at Golden-Grove Being for the Winter Half-Year (London, 1653), “Of Lukewarmnesse and Zeal,” p. 161: “as one broken link dissolves the union of the whole chain, and one jarring and untuned string spoils the whole musick; so is every sin that seises upon a portion of our affections.” 131. P: “How much farther Society is carry’d by Reason.” 138. 1733 here has “From private Sparkles raise the gen’ral Flame, / And bid SelfLove and Social be the same” (MM). 140. Nicolas Malebranche, A Treatise of Morality in Two Parts, trans. by James Shipton (London, 1699), p. 31, distinguishes between natural and free love (free love depending upon reason as well as pleasure), and states that both develop habits of love: “For Example, an Infant at his first coming into the World is a Sinner and deserves the wrath of God, because God loves Order, and the Heart of that Infant is irregular, or turn’d toward the Body by an habitual disposition of a natural, necessary, or merely voluntary Love which he derives from his Parents, without any consent on his part.” Pope seems to be suggesting that the distinction is not between a natural love and a rational love, but between a natural love and a habitual love, thus minimizing the role of reason in the selection of appropriate objects for the affections, and maximizing the role of emergence. 146. For a correspondence to Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, p. 60, see introduction, p. lxxi. John Lawrence, Christian Morals and Christian Prudence, 2 vols. (London, 1717–20), II(1720),82, talks of a broader social need to spread interest in others: “[Man] will quickly discover that he cannot live alone by his own unaided *

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IV. Nor think, in Nature’s State they blindly trod; The state of Nature was the reign of God: Self-love and Social at her birth began, Union the bond of all things, and of Man. Pride then was not; nor Arts, that Pride to aid; Man walk’d with beast, joint tenant of the shade; The same his table, and the same his bed; No murder cloath’d him, and no murder fed. In the same temple, the resounding wood, All vocal beings hymn’d their equal God: The shrine with gore unstain’d, with gold undrest, Unbrib’d, unbloody, stood the blameless priest: Heav’n’s attribute was Universal Care, And Man’s prerogative to rule, but spare. Ah! how unlike the man of times to come!

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Strength [ . . . ] All this even forces him into Company, and at the same time obliges him to procure the good Will and Opinion of others, and to spread his Interest as far as he honestly can.” 147. P: “Of the State of Nature: �at it was Social.” 149. Archibald Campbell, An Enquiry into the Original of Moral Virtue (Edinburgh, 1733), p. 51, states that some emotions are “hurtful to our Self-love, or our social Appetite, that flows from it.” 131–50. Charles Gildon, �e Deist’s Manual: Or, A Rational Enquiry into the Christian Religion (London, 1705), argues for a progressive social interest that he claims belies the Hobbesian picture of the state of nature, pp. 198–99: “Mankind had a Progressive Beginning, [ . . . ] for the Ties of Relation, the Mutual Love of Children, and Parents, Brothers, and Sisters, Wives, and Husbands, with the Consanguinities, and Friendships contracted by those Conjunctions, united Men into Families first, and then spread to larger Extent in common Interest, and Reciprocal Kindness.” 152. Donne, “The First Anniversary,” line 114, says that in the first ages man and the sun were “Joynt tenants of the world”; in “The Second Anniversary,” lines 353– 54, the speaker exhorts his soul to rise up “to those Virgins, who thought that almost / They made joyntenants with the Holy Ghost.” Thomson, Spring, 1789, calls birds “gentle tenants of the shade” and Winter, 828, the bear “Rough tenant of these shades.” 158. MLM (LGA 270–73) records rejected additional lines here that emphasize the acquisitive nature of the priesthood: “Ere pamperd Piety devoutly eat, / Or holy Avrice huggd its God in Plate.” “Nor yet his could Glutton Zeal devoutly eat  / Or faithful av’rice hugg’d hug his God in Plate.” Iliad, I.117, TE VII,92 (in the text of 1715): “Encourag’d thus, the blameless Priest replies”; Odyssey, XXI.152, TE X,266: “first Leiodes, blameless priest, appear’d.” *

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alex ander pope Of half that live the butcher and the tomb; Who, foe to Nature, hears the gen’ral groan, Murders their species, and betrays his own. But just disease to luxury succeeds, And ev’ry death it’s own avenger breeds; The Fury-passions from that blood began, And turn’d on Man a fiercer savage, Man. See him from Nature rising slow to Art! To copy Instinct then was Reason’s part; Thus then to Man the voice of Nature spake — “Go, from the Creatures thy instructions take: “Learn from the birds what food the thickets yield; “Learn from the beasts the physic of the field; *

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162. Dryden, VII(2000),488, “Of the Pythagorean Philosophy,” lines 137–38: “Not so the Golden Age, who fed on Fruit, / Nor durst with bloody Meals their Mouths pollute.” Thomson, Spring, 236–41, on herbs: “the food of man / While yet he lived in innocence, and told / A length of golden years, unfleshed in blood, / A stranger to the savage arts of life, / Death, rapine, carnage, surfeit, and disease—/ The lord and not the tyrant of the world.” 164. Rochester, “Against Reason and Mankind,” lines 129–30: “Birds feed on birds, Beasts on each other prey, / But savage Man alone does man betray.” Wycherley, “For Solitude and Retirement against the Public, Active Life,” p. 145: “But Savage Beasts, by Nature’s Law conjoyn’d, / (To others Foes) are loving to their Kind. / Man only does on his own Species turn, / And with a Rancour unextinguish’d burn.” 166. The unexpected apostrophe is in the copy text. 169. P: “Reason instructed by Instinct in the Invention of Arts, and in the Forms of Society.” 170. Reason and instinct are more firmly separated by other authors. See Cicero, Tully’s Offices, trans. by Roger L’Estrange (London, 1680), p. 7, where animal instinct and human reason are contrasted: “One is carry’d on by sense, and to That only which is present; with little or no regard to what is either past, or to come: whereas the Other, by the Benefit of Reason, sees the Consequences of Things.” Malebranche, A Treatise of Morality, p. 105: “Love and Hatred are Motions of the Soul which should never be determin’d by confus’d Sensations; they ought to be guided by Reason, and not by Instinct.” For something closer to Pope, see William Derham, Physico-�eology, 5th ed. (London, 1720), p. 214: “What less than Rational and Wise could endow irrational Animals with various Instincts, equivalent, in their special Way, to Reason it self?” See also III.89–98 and n. 172. Montaigne, “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde,” II,223: “Democritus held, and prov’d, that most of the Arts we have, were taught us by other Animals: As the Spider, to weave and sew, the Swallow to build, the Swan and Nightingale Musick, and several Animals by their imitation to make Medicines.” *

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“Thy arts of building from the bee receive; “Learn of the mole to plow, the worm to weave; “Learn of the little Nautilus to sail, “Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale. “Here too all forms of social union find, “And hence let Reason, late, instruct Mankind: “Here subterranean works and cities see; “There towns aerial on the waving tree. “Learn each small People’s genius, policies, “The Ant’s republic, and the realm of Bees; “How those in common all their wealth bestow, “And Anarchy without confusion know; “And these for ever, tho’ a Monarch reign, “Their sep’rate cells and properties maintain. “Mark what unvary’d laws preserve each state, “Laws wise as Nature, and as fix’d as Fate. “In vain thy Reason finer webs shall draw, “Entangle Justice in her net of Law, “And right, too rigid, harden into wrong; “Still for the strong too weak, the weak too strong. “Yet go! and thus o’er all the creatures sway, “Thus let the wiser make the rest obey, “And for those Arts mere Instinct could afford, “Be crown’d as Monarchs, or as Gods ador’d.”

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alex ander pope V. Great Nature spoke; observant Men obey’d; Cities were built, Societies were made: Here rose one little state; another near Grew by like means, and join’d, thro’ 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, And he return’d a friend, who came a foe. *

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Kings shall crown them, or as Gods adore. / Ed. 5. And for those Arts mere Instinct could afford, / Be crown’d as Monarchs, or as Gods ador’d.” 199. P: “Origine of Political Societies.” 202. MLM (LGA 264–65) and HLM (LGA 386–87) preserve drafts of some lines on want as the only cause of difference in nature, with tigers befriending one another when they don’t have to compete for resources, in HLM, where they are struck through, as “The Neighbors leagu’d to guard their common Spot, / And Love was Nature’s dictate, Murder not. / For Want alone each Animal contends, / Tygers with Tygers, that remov’d, are friends:  / Plain Nature’s Wants the common Mother crown’d, / She pour’d her Acorns, Herbs, and Streams around; / No Treasure then for Rapine to invade; / What neede to fight, for Sunshine or for Shade? / And half the cause of Contest was remov’d, / When Beauty could be kind to all who lov’d.” That these resources might be those of a mate is suggested by the final lines of the excised passage in HLM (they also appear lower down on the page in the right margin). The couplet does not make it clear if freedom of love (particularly females taking more than one mate) is proposed as a solution to social difference, or if beauty, being abundantly represented in many separate individuals, amply supplies demand. 199–206. Wollaston, p. 146: *

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as mankind increases, the little plots, which the several families possess, and cultivate, must be inlarged, or multiplied: by degrees they would find themselves straitend: and there would soon be a collision of interests, from whence disputes and quarrels would ensue. Other things too might minister matter for these. And beside all this, some men are naturally troublesome, vitious, thievish, pugnacious, rabid; and these would always be disturbing and flying upon the next to them: as others are ambitious, or covetous, and, if they happen to have any advantage or superiority in power, would not fail to make themselves yet greater or stronger by eating up their neighbours, till by repeated incroachments they might grow to be formidable. Under so many wants, and such apprehensions, or present dangers, necessity would bring some families into terms of friendship with others for mutual comfort and defence: and this, as the reason of it increased, would become stronger, introduce stricter ingagements, and at last bring the people to mix and unite. And then the weak being glad to shelter themselves under the protection and conduct of the more able, and so naturally giving way for these to ascend, the several sorts

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Converse and Love mankind might strongly draw, When Love was Liberty, and Nature Law. Thus States were form’d; the name of King unknown, ’Till common int’rest plac’d the sway in one. ’Twas Virtue only (or in arts or arms, Diffusing blessings, or averting harms) The same which in a Sire the Sons obey’d, A Prince the Father of a People made. VI. ’Till then, by Nature crown’d each Patriarch sate, King, priest, and parent of his growing state; On him, their second Providence, they hung, Their law his eye, their oracle his tongue. He from the wond’ring furrow call’d the food, Taught to command the fire, controul the flood, Draw forth the monsters of th’abyss profound, *

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would at length settle into their places, according to their several weights and capacities with respect to the common concern. And thus some forms of a society must arise: men cannot subsist otherwise. 207–8. Variation: “These two Lines added since the first Edition.” 210. P: “Origine of Monarchy.” 209–14. Cicero, On Duties, p. 209–11 (II.xii): “men of high moral character were made kings in order that the people might enjoy justice. For, as the masses in their helplessness were oppressed by the strong, they appealed for protection to some one man who was conspicuous for his virtue; and, as he shielded the weaker classes from wrong, he managed by establishing equitable conditions to hold the higher and the lower classes in an equality of right.” 215. P: “—[i.e. ‘Origine’] of Patriarchal Government.” 217. Plutarch’s Morals: Translated from the Greek by Several Hands, 5 vols., 4th ed. (London, 1704), V,285–7, describes fate as a “second Providence,” Zeus creating the world, then leaving the other younger gods to administer fate (the temporal unfolding of providence—see Boethius, pp. 87–88, VI.vi) so as not himself to be held responsible for human sins. See also Holland’s translation, pp. 1052–54. Nemesius, bishop of Emesa, �e Nature of Man, trans. by George Wither (London, 1636), p. 611, applauds Plato for attributing the creation and operation of the world to providence, but dispraises his suggestion of “a second providence, committed unto those which turne the heavens about,” as that is a work of necessity rather than providence. Robert Gould, “The Mourning Swain, A Funeral Eclogue” [for James, Earl of Abingdon], in �e Works of Mr. Robert Gould, 2 vols. (London, 1709), I,372–73, applies this phrase to the human and political sphere: “Where does the wond’rous Penetration lie? / Or is all Nature open to your Eye? / That thus YOU forward look among the Fates, / And seem a second Providence to States?” *

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alex ander pope Or fetch th’aerial eagle to the ground. ’Till drooping, sick’ning, dying, they began Whom they rever’d as God to mourn as Man: Then, looking up from sire to sire, explor’d One great first father, and that first ador’d. Or plain tradition that this All begun, Convey’d unbroken faith from sire to son, The worker from the work distinct was known, And simple Reason never sought but one: E’er Wit oblique had broke that steddy light, Man, like his Maker, saw that all was right, To virtue, in the paths of Pleasure, trod, And own’d a Father when he own’d a God. Love all the faith, and all th’allegiance then; For Nature knew no right divine in Men, No ill could fear in God; and understood

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225–26. Erasmus, p. 135, presents an inversion of this scheme: “a father is no longer loved simply as a father (for what did he beget except the body?—though even that too is owing to God, the father of all), but as a good man whose personality projects a shining image of that highest mind of all, to which alone they give the name ‘highest good’ and apart from which they teach that nothing is to be loved or sought.” 227–28. 1736: “Or plain Tradition that this All begun.” The fact that this couplet is introduced by “Or” suggests that tradition, passed from father to son, is an adequate alternative to reason, the rational deduction of a divine father from the human situation. Such an equivalence might be the strongest, if nonetheless a quiet, testimony to Catholicism in the poem. For oral tradition and Catholicism, see Nicholas Hudson, “ ‘Oral Tradition’: The Evolution of an Eighteenth-Century Concept,” in Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, ed. by Alvaro Ribeiro, SJ, and James G. Basker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 161–76 (pp. 162–63). MLM (LGA 264–65) begins the line with “One,” which is struck through and replaced by “Or.” See Dryden, III(1969),144, �e Hind and the Panther, II.164–67: “The good old Bishops took a simpler way, / Each ask’d but what he heard his Father say, / Or how he was instructed in his youth, / And by traditions force upheld the truth.” See also �e History of Polybius, �e Megalopolitan, trans. by Henry Sheeres (London, 1698), vol. 1, bk. III, p. 27, where Hannibal calculates that waging a very violent campaign against Saguntum is a means of making already-vanquished people “preserve their Faith unbroken.” 234. MLM (LGA 264–65) records a rejected couplet following III.234: “Twas simple Worship in the native Grove, / Religion, Morals had no name but Love.” 235. P: “Origine of True Religion and Government, from the Principle of Love; and of Superstition and Tyr anny, from that of Fear.” *

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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. Who first taught souls enslav’d, and realms undone, Th’enormous faith of many made for one; That proud exception to all Nature’s laws, T’invert the world, and counter-work its Cause? Force first made Conquest, and that conquest, Law; ’Till Superstition taught the Tyrant awe, Then shar’d the Tyranny, then lent it aid, And Gods of Conqu’rors, Slaves of Subjects made: She, ’midst the light’ning’s blaze, and thunder’s sound, When rock’d the mountains, and when groan’d the ground, She taught the weak to bend, the proud to pray, To Pow’r unseen, and mightier far than they: She, from the rending earth and bursting skies, Saw Gods descend, and fiends infernal rise: Here fix’d the dreadful, there the blest abodes; Fear made her Devils, and weak Hope her Gods; Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust, Whose attributes were Rage, Revenge, or Lust; Such as the souls of cowards might conceive, And, form’d like tyrants, tyrants would believe. Zeal then, not charity, became the guide, And hell was built on spite, and heav’n on pride. Then sacred seem’d th’etherial vault no more; Altars grew marble then, and reek’d with gore: Then first the Flamen tasted living food;

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241–44. François de Fénelon, Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, trans. and ed. by Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 60, on the authority of kings: “He can do anything to the people; but the laws can do anything to him. He has an absolute power in doing good, but his hands are tied from doing wrong. The care of the people, the most important of all trusts, is committed to him by the laws, on condition that he be the father of his subjects. The intention of the laws is that one man by his wisdom and moderation should promote the happiness of such numbers and not that such numbers by their misery and abject slavery should serve only to flatter the pride and luxury of a single man.” 265. HLM (LGA 392–93) records the revision to this line, with Pope revising away *

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alex ander pope Next his grim idol smear’d with human blood; With Heav’n’s own thunders shook the world below, And play’d the God an engine on his foe. So drives Self-love, thro’ just and thro’ unjust, To one Man’s pow’r, ambition, lucre, lust: The same Self-love, in all, becomes the cause Of what restrains him, Government and Laws. 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, A weaker may surprise, a stronger take? His safety must his liberty restrain: All join to guard what each desires to gain. Forc’d into virtue thus by Self-defence, Ev’n Kings learn’d justice and benevolence: Self-love forsook the path it first pursu’d, And found the private in the public good. *

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from direct criticism of the priestly class: “The glutton ^ pamperd Then first the Priest first living food.” 266. John Milton, Paradise Lost, I.392–96: “First Moloch, horrid King he smear’d with blood / Of humane sacrifice, and parents tears, / Though for the noyse of Drums and Timbrels loud / Their childrens cries unheard, that past through fire / To his grim Idol.” John Scott, �e Christian Life, I,116, where those of mean temper attribute their own characteristics to God, and “having thus set up such a grim Idol of God in their Minds as they can by no means affect, they secretly wish there were no such Being.” 269. P: “�e Influence of Self-Love operating to the Social and Public Good.” 272. MLM (LGA 278–79) and HLM (LGA 392–93) follow this line with a couplet, somewhat revised during the drafting of the MS, in HLM as “For say what makes where lies the Liberty of Man? / Not Tis not in doing what he will, would, but can but what he can.” This canceled couplet suggests a contextual view of liberty, but not as specifically political as the surrounding lines on law and obligation. In MLM the couplet follows the material that becomes III.201–2, making the connection between early social gathering and human liberty stronger, and thus evoking the controversy around Hobbesian and Lockeian views of social contract more clearly. See introduction, pp. lxxiii–lxxvii. 282. Pope rationalizes the localized self-love that Erasmus, p. 69, presents as a form of folly: “I see that Nature has not only given every mortal his own brand of Flamen gorg’d on tasted *

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’Twas then, the studious head or gen’rous mind, Follow’r of God or friend of human-kind, Poet or Patriot, rose but to restore The Faith and Moral, Nature gave before; Re-lum’d 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 nor to slack, nor strain its tender strings, The less, or greater, set so justly true, That touching one must strike the other too; ’Till jarring int’rests of themselves create Th’according music of a well-mix’d State. Such is the World’s great harmony, that springs From Order, Union, full Consent of things! Where small and great, where weak and mighty, made To serve, not suffer, strengthen, not invade, More pow’rful each as needful to the rest, And, in proportion as it blesses, blest, *

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Selflove but has also grafted a sort of communal form of it onto particular nations and even cities.” 283. P: “Restoration of True Religion and Government on their first Principle. Mixt Governments; with the various Forms of each, and the True Use of All.” MM notes that texts from 1739 to 1743a add: “The Deduction and Application of the foregoing Principles, with the Use or Abuse of Civil and Ecclesiastical Policy, was intended for the subject of the third book.” 288. Arthur Bury, �e Rational Deist Satisfy’d by a Just Account of the Gospel (London, 1703), p. 31, suggesting that only knowledge or righteousness (he takes them to be indifferent terms) in man resembles God, not the body or soul: “This Natural Frame is so far from deserving the Name of God’s Image, that it is not so much as his Shadow.” 294. The phrase “mixed state” is taken to describe states in which monarchic, aristocratic, and popular or democratic elements are combined, by writers who approve or disapprove of such mixtures. See Jean Bodin, �e Six Bookes of a CommonWeale, trans. by Richard Knolles (London, 1606), p. 191; Philip Hunton, A Treatise of Monarchy (London, 1643), p. 25; Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (London, 1698), p. 319. 289–96. See Fénelon, Telemachus, p. 300: “Do not doubt, my dear Telemachus, that the government of a kingdom requires a certain harmony, like music, and proportions as exact as those of architecture.” *

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alex ander pope Draw to one point, and to one centre bring Beast, Man, or Angel, Servant, Lord, or King. For Forms of Government let fools contest; Whate’er is best administer’d is best: *

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I will not enter into the Arguments or Comparisons of the several Forms of Government that have been, or are in the World; wherein that Cause seems commonly the better, that has the better Advocate, or is advantaged by fresher experience, and impressions of good or evil from any of the Forms among those that judge: They have all their heighths and their falls, their strong and weak sides; are capable of great perfections, and subject to great corruptions; and though the preference seem already decided in what has been said of a single Person being the original and natural Government; and that it is capable of the greatest Authority, (which is the foundation of all ease, safety, and order in the Governments of the World) yet it may perhaps be the most reasonably concluded, That those Forms are best, which have been longest receiv’d and most authorized in a Nation by custom and use; and into which the Humours and Manners of the People run with the most general and strongest current. Or else, that those are the best Governments, where the best Men govern; and that the difference is not so great in the Forms of Magistracy, as in the Persons of Magistrates; [ . . . ] Now were the Constitution of any Government never so perfect, the Laws never so just, yet if the Administration be ill, ignorant, or corrupt, too rigid, or too remiss, too negligent or severe, there will be more just Occasions given of Discontent and Complaint, than from any Weakness or Fault in the original Conception or Institution of Government. For it may perhaps be concluded, with as much Reason as other Theams of the like Nature, That those are generally the best Governments where the best Men govern; and let the Sort or Scheme be what it will, those are ill Governments where ill Men govern, and are generally employ’d in the Offices of State. The note on these lines actually exists in three forms in BL Egerton MS 1950, ff. 8–10. The version MM gives in his annotation is slightly mistranscribed and omits a phrase in ellipses that seems to prefer mixed to absolute monarchy. Here is my transcription of f. 9r:

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Written in the year 1740 x The Author by these lines was far from meaning that no one Form of Governmt was ^ is not in itself better yn another (as that mixt ^ or limited Monarchy, for example was is not preferable to absolute) but that no Form of Govern ment, however excellent or preferable in itself, can be sufficient to make a People happy, unless it be administerd with ye utmost Integrity. On ye contrary, the Best Form Sort of Governmt when ye Form only of it is preserved, and ye Administration corrupt, is most dangerous. The sheet bound as f. 9 is the title page of or advertisement for a book that uses Pope’s couplet as one of its two epigraphs, the other being from Machiavelli. Published anonymously, the book is Thomas Catesby Paget, Some Reflections upon the Administration of Government (London, 1740). Evidently this version of the note could not have been written before the publication of that book. The transcription MM provides as Appendix B to TE III.i (p. 170) from f. 8r is accurate but removes the two lines of verse that introduce the note. These lines are of interest because they misquote the poem to bolster P’s self-defense: “For Forms of Governmt let Fools contest / That which is best administred, is best.” f. 8v contains the two couplets found in TE VI,391 (“But Ministers like Gladiators live”). A third version of the note is found on f. 10r: For Forms of Goverment let fools Contest, Whate’er is best administred, is best. The Author by these lines was far from meaning that no one Form of Goverment is not, in it self, better then another (as that mixed or limited Monarchy, for example, is not preferable to absolute) but that no Form of Goverment, however excellent or preferable in it self, can be Sufficient to make a people happy unless it be administred with Integrity. On the Contrary the Best sort of Goverment when the Form of it is preserv’d, and the Administration corrupt, is most dangerous. In a word, a worse ˄ no Form of Government ˄ is so bad, but that if well administerd, is it will be preferable to a better, ill administred: ˄ it not being Policy and Religion ought to can never be so useful in or in other words it is not the Theory as in but the Practise, that must ren —der any Government or Religion useful to Society. The text is in a hand other than Pope’s up to “most dangerous.” At that point Pope’s hand takes over. Perhaps his most radical rejected thought here is that religion is useful to society only in practice. It is one thing to suggest that government is of no value in the abstract, another to suggest that the usefulness of religion is dependent upon its human practice. The draft is further evidence of the scope of commitments Pope might have entertained in the process of composing and revising the poem.

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alex ander pope For Modes of Faith let graceless zealots fight; His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right: In Faith and Hope the world will disagree, But all Mankind’s concern is Charity: All must be false that thwart this One great End, And all of God, that bless Mankind or mend. Man, like the gen’rous vine, supported lives; The strength he gains is from th’embrace he gives. On their own Axis as the Planets run, Yet make at once their circle round the Sun: So two consistent motions act the Soul; And one regards Itself, and one the Whole. Thus God and Nature link’d the gen’ral frame, And bade Self-love and Social be the same.

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E P I S T L E I V. A RG U M E N T.

Of the Nature and State of Man, with respect to Happiness. I. F A L S E Notions of Happiness, Philosophical and Popular, answered from Ver. 19 to 76. 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. �e error of imputing to Virtue what are only the calamities of Nature, or of Fortune, Ver. 93. IV. �e folly of expecting that God should alter his general Laws in favour of particulars, Ver. 111. V. �at we are not judges who are good; but that whoever they are, they must be happiest, Ver. 131 &c. VI. �at external goods are not the proper rewards, but often inconsistent with, or destructive of Virtue, Ver. 167. �at 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. With pictures of human Infelicity in Men possest of them all, Ver. 269, &c. VII. �at Virtue only constitutes a Happiness, whose object is universal, and whose prospect eternal, Ver. 309, &c. �at 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. 325, &c. *

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H Happiness! our being’s end and aim! 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, O’er-look’d, seen double, by the fool, and wise. Plant of celestial seed! if dropt below, Say, in what mortal soil thou deign’st to grow? Fair op’ning to some Court’s propitious shine, Or deep with di’monds in the flaming mine? Twin’d with the wreaths Parnassian lawrels yield, Or reap’d in iron harvests of the field? Where grows? — where grows it not? — If vain our toil, We ought to blame the culture, not the soil: Fix’d to no spot is Happiness sincere, ’Tis no where to be found, or ev’ry where;

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288–89) sketches out arguments for the epistle as shoulder notes on the first page of the draft: “1 Happiness ye End of Man. God implants ye desire in all mankind, & he shows not ye End wthout ye Means, wch is Virtue 2 He implants further a desire of Immortality wch at least proves he wd have us think of & expect it, & he gives no desire appetite in vain to any Creature As God plainly gave this Hope or instinct, it is plain Man should entertain it. Hence flows his greatest Hope & 3. Hope his sum-u~ greatest Incentive to Virtue bonum, not Possession Hobs always something to come. So on to Im- ortality. 1. That Happiness is social equal 2 Therefore dwells in no Excess 3. & is Social 4. That to be equal it must be Not External but mental 5 necessity that External Goods shd be unequal for ORDER & common Good.” Reference to and revision and extension of these shoulder notes is made over the remainder of the MS Epistle. MM (LGA 192–93) offers a commentary on these notes and glosses. 1–6. Chudleigh, “Of Self-Love,” p. 301: “We are born with a strong Desire of being happy; ’tis a Principle coæval with our Souls, it grows with us, and will prove as lasting as our Beings; ’tis the Centre to which all our Motions tend, it gives a Byass to our Actions, a sort of Fermentation to our Spirits, makes us press forward, keeps our Thoughts bent, and always ready, with a precipitous Eagerness, a violent Impetuosity to rush on every Appearance of Good, to grasp whatever has but the Resemblance of Happiness, or, what is infinitely more deplorable, too often obtrudes upon us real Evils for seeming Goods.” 7. Dryden, II(1972),14, Absalom and Achitophel, lines 305–6: “Desire of Power, on Earth a Vitious Weed, / Yet, sprung from High, is of Cælestial Seed.” 9. Odyssey, III.488–89, TE IX,111: “So guide me, Goddess! so propitious shine / On me, my consort, and my royal line!” *

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’Tis never to be bought, but always free, And fled from Monarchs, St. John! dwells with thee. I. Ask of the Learn’d the way, the Learn’d are blind, This bids to serve, and that to shun mankind; Some place the bliss in action, some in ease, Those call it Pleasure, and Contentment these; Some sunk to Beasts, find pleasure end in pain; Some swell’d to Gods, confess ev’n Virtue vain; Or indolent, to each extreme they fall, To trust in ev’ry thing, or doubt of all. Who thus define it, say they more or less Than this, that Happiness is Happiness? II. Take Nature’s path, and mad Opinion’s leave, All states can reach it, and all heads conceive; Obvious her goods, in no extreme they dwell, There needs but thinking right, and meaning well; And mourn our various portions as we please, *

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18. Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. See I.1n. In 1734 he is referred to as Lelius. 24. Dryden, IV(1974), 277, “Persius: Satyr I,” lines 267–68: “Him, also, for my Censor I disdain, / Who thinks all Science, as all Virtue vain.” 23–26. As MM notes in TE, these lines are added in 1743b. 1–28. Dryden, II(1972),110, Religio Laici, lines 25–35, where the topic of human good causes pagan philosophers still more problems than cosmology: “But least of all could their Endeavours find / What most concern’d the good of Humane kind: / For Happiness was never to be found; / But vanish’d from ’em, like Enchanted ground. / One thought Content the good to be enjoy’d: / This, every little Accident destroy’d: / The wiser Madmen did for Vertue toyl: / A Thorny, or at best a barren Soil: / In Pleasure some their glutton Souls would steep; / But found their Line too short, the Well too deep; / And leaky Vessels which no Bliss could keep.” 27–28. Jeremy Collier, “A Moral Essay Concerning Cloaths,” in Miscellanies in Five Essays (London, 1694), p. 2, where Philotimus the lover of fashion expresses the view that “Happiness is Happiness; whether ’tis founded in Reason or Imagination, ’tis all a Case to me, provided I have a vigorous Sence of it.” Following IV.28 texts from 1734 to 1743a have “One grants his Pleasure is but Rest from pain, / One doubts of All, one owns ev’n Virtue vain” (MM). 29. P: “Happiness the End of all Men, and attainable by all.” MLM (LGA 288– 89) records an unused marginal couplet next to this passage: “Heavn plants no vain Desire in humankind, / But wt it prompts to seek, directs to find.” MM silently expands the contraction of “what” in his transcription. *

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alex ander pope Equal is Common Sense, and Common Ease. Remember, Man, “the Universal Cause “Acts not by partial, but by gen’ral laws;” And makes what Happiness we justly call Subsist not in the good of one, but all. There’s not a blessing Individuals find, But some way leans and hearkens to the kind. No Bandit fierce, no Tyrant mad with pride, No cavern’d Hermit, rests self-satisfy’d. Who most to shun or hate Mankind pretend, Seek an admirer, or would fix a friend. Abstract what others feel, what others think, 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. Order is Heav’n’s first law; and this confest, Some are, and must be, greater than the rest, More rich, more wise; but who infers from hence *

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34. P: “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.” 35–38. James Tyrrell, A Brief Disquisition of the Law of Nature According to the Principles and Method Laid Down in the Reverend Dr. Cumberland’s [ . . . ] Latin Treatise on that Subject (London, 1692), p. 45: “I come now to make the like Observations from the Nature of Mankind, in order to the proving, that we are designed by God for the Good and Preservation of others besides our selves, and that in the doing of this, we procure (as far as lies in our Power) the Good and Happiness of all Rational Beings, in which our own is likewise included.” 40. MLM (LGA 290–91) continues the couplet, “Tis shard, tis Friendship, Love, in some degree.” MLM also records the following rejected lines: “Of human nature Wit its worst may write / We all revere it in our own despite.” 47–48. MLM is heavily revised at this point (LGA 290–91). One draft line runs “True CHARITY is mans chief Happiness.” 49. P: “It is necessary for Order and the common Peace, that External Goods be unequal, therefore Happiness is not constituted in these.” 49–50. For a correspondence to Plotinus, III.2, 3, p. 159, see introduction, p. xxxiv. Leibniz, p. 193, extends hierarchy into goodness: “There are degrees among creatures: the general order requires it. And it appears quite consistent with the order of divine government that the great privilege of strengthening in the good should be granted more easily to those who had a good will when they were in a more perfect state, in the state of struggle and of pilgrimage, in Ecclesia militante, in statu viatorum.” *

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49–52. TE notes various sources in sermons and theological writings for these ideas, such as Robert Moss, �e Providential Division of Men into Rich and Poor and the Respective Duties thence Arising (London, 1708), pp. 3–5: *

whatever Diversity may appear in Mens outward Circumstances, how unequal soever the Distribution of God’s common Gifts may seem, we must still conclude, that there is a competent Provision made for the Happiness of all, because God cannot be suspected of Partiality to any [ . . . ] there could be no Government without Subordination. [ . . . ] [different conditions allow the exercise of different virtues] we cannot suppose God’s Creation to be so defective, as that any thing should be wanting to make Men happy; yet neither can we be so fond as to imagine that Man’s true Happiness should consist in the Affluence or Abundance of any thing that this Earth can furnish. Were it so, we should not see one Man rolling in Ease and Plenty, whilst another sweats hard to live, or groans under pinching Necessity. No! we may depend upon it, all these things would be distributed with an even Hand, and in the exactest Proportion, if they were indeed Essential to our Happiness[.] MLM (LGA 298–99) records a couplet struck through near the top of the page, beneath the prose discussion: “That Powr who made ye Diffrence sure knew knows ye best; / Were all men Equal, all men w.d Contest.” Next to this couplet there is a note in the shoulder, struck through: “see Peace. Pasc. 291.311.” Pascal, p. 291–92, talking of natural and wise ignorance, and the troublesome state between: Those Persons who lie between these Extremities, who have got beyond Natural Ignorance, but cannot arrive at that Ignorance which is the effect of Wisedom, have a tincture of Science which swells them with Vanity and Sufficiency. These are the Men that trouble the World, and that make the falsest Judgments of all things in it. The Vulgar and the truly Knowing, compose the ordinary Train of Men: those of the middle Character despise All, and, in return, are despised by All. *The Multitude have a profess’d Veneration for Persons of Birth and Quality. The half-learn’d as professedly contemn them; alledging that the Advantage of a Noble Birth is the Merit of Fortune, and not of the Man. The truly Learned, respect and honour them; not upon the Motives of the Vulgar, but upon a higher View. Persons of much Zeal and little Knowledge do again despise them; as judging, not by either of these Considerations, but by the Maxims of Religion. But Men of an advanced and finish’d Piety, are still wont to treat them with esteem and Reverence, upon a superior Principle, and a larger degree of Illumination. Thus there is a succession of Opinions, for, or against, according to the different measures and proportions of Knowledge and Light. For the second paragraph cited, on equality as an interior quality, see introduction, p. lxxx.

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alex ander pope If all are equal in their Happiness: But mutual wants this Happiness increase, 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: Heav’n breaths thro’ ev’ry member of the whole One common blessing, as one common soul. But Fortune’s gifts if each alike possest, And each were equal, must not all contest? If then to all Men Happiness was meant, God in Externals could not place Content.

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62. Thinkers of different persuasions entertain the idea of a common soul. Henry More, �e Immortality of the Soul, So Farre Forth as it is Demonstrable from the Knowledge of Nature and the Light of Reason (London, 1659), p. 475, lists it as an objection to the soul’s immortality that “there is but One Common Soul in all Men and Beasts, that operates according to the variety of Animals and Persons it does actuate and vivificate, bearing a seeming particularity according to the particular pieces of Matter it enforms, but is one in all.” Lord Herbert of Cherbury, “A Meditation upon his WaxCandle Burning Out,” in Occasional Verses of Edward Lord Herbert, Baron of Cherbery (London, 1665), p. 83, speaks of bodies being “Quick’ned again by the worlds common soul, / Which is it self and in each part is whole.” Richard Burthogge, Of the Soul of the World and of Particular Souls in a Letter to Mr. Lock (London, 1699), p. 23: “the Spirit of God (as if it were a common Soul) is the Original Principle of Life and vital Operation in Man, as well as in all things else that have Life.” Dryden, V(1987),560, Virgil’s Aeneid, VI.980–83: “Know first, that Heav’n, and Earth’s compacted Frame, / And flowing Waters, and the starry Flame,  / And both the Radiant Lights, one Common Soul / Inspires, and feeds, and animates the whole.” John Scott, �e Christian Life Part III, vol. 4 (London, 1696), pp. 246–47: “though the Humane Nature be largely diffused and spread through infinite Numbers of Individuals, which by vast distances of Time and Place are separated from one another; yet as if it were but all one common Soul, operating in several Bodies in several Times and Places, it feels almost in every one Body, what it enjoys, or suffers in every other; and whether it be pleased or offended in one Individual, is pleased or offended in them all: And though the Sense be quickest in that Individual Part, or Member of Humane Nature, upon which the Pain or Pleasure strikes immediately; yet all the rest how distant soever in Time or Place, as soon as they have notice of it, are sensibly touched and affected with it.” 66. Thomas Watson, compiler of A Body of Practical Divinity (London, 1692), pro*

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Fortune her gifts may variously dispose, And these be happy call’d, unhappy those; But Heav’n’s just balance equal will appear, While those are plac’d in Hope, and these in Fear: Not present good or ill, the joy or curse, But future views of better, or of worse. Oh sons of earth! attempt ye still to rise, By mountains pil’d on mountains, to the skies? Heav’n still with laughter the vain toil surveys, And buries madmen in the heaps they raise. *

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poses a question to which the divine must be trained to respond, p. 544: “How may we be content though God cut us short in these Externals; though we have but little daily bread, and coarse?” 67. P: “The balance of human happiness kept equal (notwithstanding Externals) by Hope and Fear.” 69–70. Frances, Lady Norton, �e Applause of Virtue (London, 1705), p. 70, cites a passage from Augustine on God’s attributes, including being “So Just, that his Balance propenseth neither to one side nor other.” Torquato Tasso, Godfrey of Bulloigne, trans. by Edward Fairfax (Dublin, 1726), p. 628: “Thus they fought long, yet neither shrink nor yield, / In equal Ballance hung their hope and fear.” 67–72. Several writers with whom Pope was familiar treat fear of material loss as a demonstration of the indifference of wealth to happiness. Dryden, IV(1974),209, “Juvenal: Satyr X,” lines 29–34: “The Fearful Passenger, who Travels late, / Charg’d with the Carriage of a Paltry Plate, / Shakes at the Moonshine shadow of a Rush; / And sees a Red-Coat rise from every Bush: / The Beggar Sings, ev’n when he sees the place / Beset with Thieves, and never mends his pace.” Boethius, II.v, p. 31: “I surely cannot be mistaken when I claim that nothing which harms its possessor can be good? Of course not, you reply. Yet riches have often harmed their owners. Individuals who are thoroughly evil, and who are accordingly all the greedier for what does not belong to them, believe that they alone are pre-eminently worthy to own all the gold and precious stones in existence. You yourself are apprehensive at present, fearful of the club and sword, but if as a traveller on life’s path you had first set out with empty pockets, you could face the highwayman with a song on your lips.” William Temple, “Heads, Designed for an Essay Upon the Different Conditions of Life and Fortune,” I,306: “The greatest Prince, possess’d with Superstition and Fears of Death, more unhappy, than any private Man of common Fortune, and well constituted Mind.” William Wycherley, Miscellany Poems (London, 1704), “Upon Life, and Death; and the Vain Love, or Fear of them,” p. 253, describes the tendency of rational foresight “To doubt the Present Good, and undergo  / The Future Ill, whether it comes, or no.” *

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alex ander pope III. Know, all the good that individuals find, Or God and Nature meant to mere Mankind; Reason’s whole pleasure, all the joys of Sense, Lie in three words, Health, Peace, and Competence. But Health consists with Temperance alone, And Peace, oh Virtue! Peace is all thy own. The good or bad the gifts of Fortune gain, But these less taste them, as they worse obtain. Say, in pursuit of profit or delight, Who risk the most, that take wrong means, or right? Of Vice or Virtue, whether blest or curst, Which meets contempt, or which compassion first? Count all th’advantage prosp’rous Vice attains, *

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77. P: “In what the Happiness of Individuals consists, and that the Good Man has the Advantage, even in this world.” 77–82. Martial Ep.10.47, trans. by Edward Sherburne, in Martial in English, ed. by J. P. Sullivan and A. J. Boyle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 73: “Those things which make life truly blest, / Sweetest Martial hear exprest: / Wealth left, and not from Labour growing;  / A gratefull soyl, a Hearth still glowing;  / No Strife, small Business, Peace of Mind / Quick Wit, a Body well inclin’d, / Wise Innocence, Friends of one Heart, / Cheap Food, a Table without Art[.]” 83. BL C.122.e.31 corrects in the margin to “The good and bad the gifts of Fortune gain.” “and” makes it clear that both the good and the bad gain fortune’s gifts, whereas “or” leaves it possible that either one or the other group does so exclusively. Aurelius, II.viii, p. 14: “As for life therefore, and death, honour and dishonour, labour and pleasure, riches and poverty, all these things happen unto men indeed, both good and bad, equally; but as things which of themselves are neither good nor bad; because of themselves, neither shameful nor praiseworthy.” Boethius, II.vi, p. 33: “Since there is no doubt that the most wicked of men frequently administer high offices, it is likewise clear that positions which lend themselves to association with the wicked are not good by their nature. The same claim can be even more justifiably made about all the gifts of Fortune, which every scoundrel attains in abundant measure.” 89. Prosperous vice is the other side of the problem of calamitous virtue; see introduction. Boethius, Of the Consolation of Philosophy, trans. by Richard Lord Viscount Preston (London, 1712), p. 35, I.iv, metrum: “prosperous Vice unjustly is enthron’d.” “prosperous Vice” appears in George Sandys, A Paraphrase upon the Psalms of David (London, 1676), LXXIII, p. 126, where KJV has “I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.” John Norris, A Letter to Mr. Dodwell, Concerning the Immortality of the Soul of Man (London, 1709), p. 61, asks if Heathens are not interested in future judgment, “not only as to what you call the retrospective part, that which concerns the adjustments of some inequalities of this Life, those of Calamitous *

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’Tis but what Virtue flies from and disdains: And grant the bad what happiness they wou’d, One they must want, which is, to pass for good. Oh blind to truth, and God’s whole scheme below, Who fancy Bliss to Vice, to Virtue Woe! Who sees and follows that great scheme the best, Best knows the blessing, and will most be blest. But fools the Good alone unhappy call, For ills or accidents that chance to all. See Falkland dies, the virtuous and the just!

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Vertue, or Prosperous Vice, but even in the final Sentences of that Judgment, with all the Consequences that are to follow upon it.” William Wishart, �e Certain and Unchangeable Difference Betwixt Moral Good and Evil (London, 1732), p. 25, questions the behavior of some who hope “to serve the cause of Religion and Revelation, by representing the present condition of virtue as most melancholy and calamitous; and with this preposterous view have join’d in the cry of calling the proud happy; and setting forth the state of prosperous vice as a condition to be envy’d.” 93. P: “�at no man is unhappy thro’ Virtue.” 93–94. Before these lines in MLM (LGA 294–95) there are four lines that relate to the “enormous faith of many made for one” at III.242: “Say not, ‘Hea’vn here profuse, there meanly saves, / And for one Monarch makes a thousd slaves.’ / You We find Tis plain when Causes & their Ends are known, / Twas Tis for the thous d Heavn has made that One.” 95. The tension between Epistle I, dedicated to the impossibility of humans seeing and following the providential scheme, and this assertion that doing so is the means to happiness and lies within the grasp of all is discussed in the introduction. 95–96. For following nature as the means to achieve goodness, see, for example, Cicero, On Friendship, p. 37, V:19: “let us consider them to deserve the name of good men, as they have hitherto been held to be, in that they follow, as far as human beings can, the best guide for living well, that is Nature.” 83–98. MM (LGA 193–94) notes the relation of this passage to Wollaston, citing a note in MLM next to a sketch of these lines that says, “See Woolaston 71. 110. 182” (LGA 298–99). For the relevant passages from Wollaston, see introduction, pp. lxxxi– lxxxii. Also found on this page is the following note: “Cur bona malis, Mala bonis accidunt? Principio negatur.” For a further MS note and correspondence to Seneca, I,2–3, see introduction, pp. lxxx–lxxxi. For the claim that by virtue of belonging to a kind, innocent humans will necessarily suffer collective ills or punishments, see Lipsius, pp. 173–75: “For ther is a certen bonde of lawes, and communion of rights that knitteth together these greate bodies, which causeth a participation of rewards and punishments to bee betwixt those that haue liued in diuers ages. [ . . . ] in a common multitude the sin of a fewe, is often required at the hands of all.” 99. Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland (1609/10–43) was in the 1630s the *

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alex ander pope See god-like Turenne prostrate on the dust! See Sidney bleeds amid the martial strife! Was this their Virtue, or Contempt of Life? Say, was it Virtue, more tho’ Heav’n ne’er gave, Lamented Digby! sunk thee to the grave? Tell me, if Virtue made the Son expire, Why, full of days and honour, lives the Sire? Why drew Marseille’s good bishop purer breath, When Nature sicken’d, and each gale was death? Or why so long (in life if long can be) Lent Heav’n a parent to the poor and me? *

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center of a circle of philosophers, historians, and poets at his Oxfordshire estate of Great Tew. He was a moderate royalist in politics who emphasized the importance of the constitution, and whose death at the Battle of Newbury has been described as tantamount to suicide. 100. Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, vicomte de Turenne (1611–75) was a French general who had been particularly effective in the later stages of a civil uprising in the 1650s and in which, despite having at first been among the rebels, he supported the king, Louis XIV. He died in a war against the Dutch. 101. Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) was a diplomat, courtier, and poet. Although Elizabeth I displayed some reserve toward him, he was entrusted with missions overseas, including the governorship of a town now in the Netherlands, Flushing. It was in a battle against Spanish forces at Zutphen that Sidney received the wound that was to kill him. 104–5. William Digby (1661/62–1752) demonstrated a commitment to passive obedience in his early parliamentary career and eventually retired from politics when unable to commit to William III’s regime. He inherited the Sherborne estate in Dorset, where Pope visited the family in 1724. Pope wrote an epitaph on Robert (?1692– 1726), his son, with whom Pope had corresponded since 1717; see TE VI,313–16. Pope writes to Robert’s brother Edward, 21 April 1726 (Corr., II,376), suggesting that Robert was a pattern by which to live. 107–8. Henri François Xavier de Belsunce de Castelmoron (1671–1755) was made bishop of Marseille in 1709 and remained in the city during an outbreak of the plague, 1720–21. He saw the plague as a divinely ordained event and integrated it into his opposition to Jansenism. See Juno Thérèse Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), pp. 161–77. 109–10. Edith Pope (1643–1733). MM (Pope: A Life, p. 546) relates to these lines the fact that “Those chosen to carry her coffin, after a custom much honored in those times as bringing with it an emolument of clothing and perhaps money, were six of the poorest and oldest men of the parish, and the bearers of her pall were six of the oldest and poorest women.” *

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IV. 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, Short, and but rare, ’till Man improv’d it all. We just as wisely might of Heav’n complain, That righteous Abel was destroy’d by Cain; As that the virtuous son is ill at ease, When his lewd father gave the dire disease. Think we, like some weak Prince, th’Eternal Cause, Prone for his fav’rites to reverse his laws? Shall burning Ætna, if a sage requires, Forget to thunder, and recall her fires? On air or sea new motions be imprest, Oh blameless Bethel! to relieve thy breast? When the loose mountain trembles from on high, Shall gravitation cease, if you go by?

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113–16. The texts of 1734 are more compact: “God sends not Ill, ’tis Nature lets it fall / Or Chance escape, and Man improves it all.” That compaction of the lines also admits chance into the operations of the creation. Pope notes this change in his variations of 1735. 121–22. William Sherlock, Sermons Preach’d Upon Several Occasions, 2 vols. (London, 1719), II,340: “Miracles [ . . . ] must have a divine Cause, a Cause superior to Nature, which can reverse its Laws, and act without it; which proves that there is an invisible Being which governs Nature.” 123–24. Pope knew the anecdote that Empedocles had thrown himself into Etna. �e Works of Mr Alexander Pope, in Prose, 2 vols. (London, 1737–41), II(1741),206: “Horace, in search of the Sublime, struck his head against the Stars; but Empedocles, to fathom the Profound, threw himself into Ætna.” 126. Hugh Bethel (1689–1747), a Yorkshire landowner and MP for Pontefract, one of Pope’s closest friends: they corresponded from 1723 until Pope’s death, and he was named alongside William Fortescue as an executor in an early will of Pope’s (Corr., IV,222). Bethel traveled to Beverley in Yorkshire every year for the relief of his asthma, which is probably the subject of the allusion here. Pope writing to Swift, 3 September 1726 (Corr., II,395), says, “Mr. Bethel indeed is too good and too honest to live in the world, but yet ’tis fit, for its example, he should.” 127–28. George Berkeley, Passive Obedience (Dublin, 1712), p. 27: “Suppose a Prince, on whose Life the Welfare of a Kingdom depends, to Fall down a Precipice, we have no Reason to think that the Universal Law of Gravitation wou’d be Sus*

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alex ander pope Or some old temple, nodding to its fall, For Chartres’ head reserve the hanging wall? V. 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: But first consider how those Just agree. The good must merit God’s peculiar care; 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. What shocks one part will edify the rest, *

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pended in that Case. The like may be said of all other Laws of Nature, which we do not find to admit of Exceptions on particular Accounts.” 130. Francis Charteris (1665–1732) was known as a gambler, took a commission as a colonel and fought in the 1715 Jacobite uprising (perhaps on both sides), and was a convicted rapist; he was saved from the death sentence by his vast and criminally accumulated wealth, only to be hounded to an early death, possibly through overuse of opiates. Pope includes a substantial note on Charteris in Epistle to Bathurst, line 20, TE III.ii,83, which itself contains an epitaph written by Arbuthnot that makes the character of Charteris an illustration of the impossibility that providence designs wealth as a reward for virtue, one of the key themes of Epistle IV. Arbuthnot’s epitaph ends as follows: “Oh Indignant Reader! / Think not his Life useless to Mankind!  / Providence conniv’d at his execrable Designs,  / To give to After-ages a conspicuous Proof, and Ex ample,  / Of how small Estimation is Exorbitant Wealth / in the Sight of GOD, by his bestowing it on / The most unworthy of all Mortals.” 134. BL C.122.e.31 corrects the emphasis with an underlining and marginal mark “Ital”: “But first consider how those just agree.” 135. Dryden, VII(2000),243, “Baucis and Philemon,” lines 198–99: “The Good, said I, are God’s peculiar Care, / And such as honour Heav’n, shall heav’nly Honour share.” Joseph Browne, State and Miscellany Poems (London, 1715), “The Gothick Hero. A Poem, Sacred to the Memory of Charles XII, King of Sweden,” p. 376, where heroes are “The Gods good Gifts, and their peculiar Care.” Oppian’s Halieuticks, II.1062, p. 104: “The Good and Just are Heaven’s peculiar Care.” 137, 139. Jean Calvin (1509–64) was a key figure in the Reformation, arguing for the priority of grace over works, and against episcopacy. Born in Picardy, settling in Geneva, he was highly influential in British Protestantism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. *

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Nor with one system can they all be blest. The very best will variously incline, And what rewards your Virtue, punish mine. “Whatever is, is right.” — This world, ’tis true, Was made for Cæsar — but for Titus too: And which more blest? who chain’d his country, say, Or he whose Virtue sigh’d to lose a day? “But sometimes Virtue starves, while Vice is fed.” What then? Is the reward of Virtue bread? That, Vice may merit; ’tis the price of toil; 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. The good man may be weak, be indolent, 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?” Nay, why external for internal giv’n? Why is not Man a God, and Earth a Heav’n? *

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142. The texts of 1734 here insert a couplet: “Give each a System, all must be at strife; / What diff ’rent Systems for a man and wife?” MLM (LGA 296–97) includes a draft of the same couplet. The rhyme recalls An Essay on Criticism, lines 82–83, TE I,248: “For Wit and Judgment often are at strife, / Tho’ meant each other’s Aid, like Man and Wife.” Pope records the omission in his variations of 1735. 145. MLM (LGA 296–97) has for the first half of this line “Een leave it as it is,” perhaps suggesting that Pope saw the phrase closing Epistle I and repeated here as implying an acceptance of circumstances that do not initially seem optimal. 146. For Titus, see II.198–200n. Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars II, trans. by J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), p. 331, records Titus’s apparent generosity in preserving and extending imperial favors granted to individuals: “On another occasion, remembering at dinner that he had done nothing for anybody all day, he gave utterance to that memorable and praiseworthy remark: ‘Friends, I have lost a day.’ ” 152. Plotinus, III.2, 8, pp. 144–45: “the law decrees that to come safe out of battle is for fighting men, not for those that pray. The harvest comes home not for praying but for tilling; healthy days are not for those that neglect their health: we have no right to complain of the ignoble getting the richer harvest if they are the only workers in the fields, or the best.” *

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alex ander pope Who ask and reason thus, will scarce conceive God gives enough, while he has more to give: Immense the pow’r, immense were the demand; Say, at what part of nature will they stand? VI. What nothing earthly gives, or can destroy, The soul’s calm sun-shine, and the heart-felt joy, Is Virtue’s prize: A better would you fix? Then give Humility a coach and six, Justice a Conq’ror’s sword, or Truth a gown, Or Public Spirit its great cure, a Crown. Weak, foolish man! will Heav’n reward us there With the same trash mad mortals wish for here? The Boy and Man an individual makes, 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 assign’d, As toys and empires, for a god-like mind. 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! To whom can Riches give Repute, or Trust, Content, or Pleasure, but the Good and Just? Judges and Senates have been bought for gold, Esteem and Love were never to be sold. Oh fool! to think God hates the worthy mind, The lover and the love of human-kind, Whose life is healthful, and whose conscience clear;

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Because he wants a thousand pounds a year. 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, One flaunts in rags, one flutters in brocade, The cobler apron’d, and the parson gown’d, The frier hooded, and the monarch crown’d. “What differ more (you cry) than crown and cowl?” I’ll tell you, friend! a Wise man and a Fool. You’ll find, if once the monarch acts the monk, Or, cobler-like, the parson will be drunk, Worth makes the man, and want of it, the fellow; The rest is all but leather or prunella. Stuck o’er with titles and hung round with strings, That thou may’st be by kings, or whores of kings. Boast the pure blood of an illustrious race, In quiet flow from Lucrece to Lucrece; *

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alex ander pope But by your father’s worth if your’s you rate, Count me those only who were good and great. Go! if your ancient, but ignoble blood Has crept thro’ scoundrels ever since the flood, Go! and pretend your family is young; Nor own, your fathers have been fools so long. What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards? Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards. 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 to the Swede;

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iers. [ . . . ] / Mais qui m’assurera [ . . . ] / Et si leur sang tout pur avecque leur noblesse, / Est passé jusqu’à vous de Lucrece en Lucrece?” �e Works of Monsieur Boileau, vol. 1, p. 189: “Your Race, we grant, is known; / But how far backwards can you trace it down? / You answer: ‘For at least a Thousand Year / And some odd Hundreds you can mak’t appear;[’] [ . . . ] But who is there so bold that dares engage / His Honor, that in this long Tract of Age / No one of all his Ancestors deceas’d / Had e’er the Fate to find a Bride unchast? / That they have all along Lucretia’s been, / And nothing e’er of spurious Blood crept in, / To mingle and defile the sacred Line?” The reference is to Lucretia, the wife of L. Tarquinius Collatinus, who was raped by Sextus, son of Tarquinius Superbus, and who then committed suicide (and is a frequent subject in the visual and literary arts). She here stands for chastity, Pope’s sense being that even if every generation of women in a long family history remained faithful to their husbands and preserved the patriarchal lineage, it would still be only the virtuous ancestors who would be a credit to someone in the present. 205–16. John Howard was created Duke of Norfolk in 1483, and the family, up to Pope’s time, included earls of Surrey (such as Henry Howard, 1516/17–47) and Nottingham. It is a major aristocratic family. Chudleigh, “Of Pride,” p. 262: “A Man may be born to Honour, and yet a Fool; may be able to boast of his being sprung from illustrious Progenitors, from a long Race of Heroes, and yet prove the Disgrace of his Family.” Wycherley, “Miscellaneous Essays in Prose and Verse,” p. 79: “to be allied to great Estates, and great Titles, sets our Forefathers in a fair Light, but can never reflect their Lustre upon ourselves, unless their Virtue, like their Possessions, were to descend by Inheritance. To value our selves therefore, on their Humours or Actions, without emulating them in our Practice, is living on an Estate that is not our own, and being sure to die Beggars in the Esteem of the World.” 220. Macedonia’s madman is Alexander the Great. See I.160n. Here he is regarded as excessively bellicose. The Swede is Charles XII of Sweden (1682–1718), who reigned from 1697 to his death, warring against Denmark, Poland, Russia, and Norway, eventually dying in the course of a siege. *

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The whole strange purpose of their lives, to find Or make, an enemy of all mankind! Not one looks backward, onward still he goes, Yet ne’er looks forward farther than his nose. No less alike the Politic and Wise, All sly slow things, 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 to call a Villain Great: 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, or bleed Like Socrates, that Man is great indeed. What’s Fame? a fancy’d life in others breath, A thing beyond us, ev’n before our death. Just what you hear, you have, and what’s unknown The same (my Lord) if Tully’s, or your own.

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235. Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus (121–80) was emperor from 161 to 180, fought against invasion from the north, and wrote his Meditations, cited frequently in these notes. 236. Socrates (469–399 bc), the philosopher whose thought is dramatized in the dialogues of Plato, and who was sentenced to death by Athenian authorities for corrupting youth. He died from drinking hemlock and so would not have bled. 233–36. Addison’s Cato has a Senecan view of adversity, II, p. 24: “valour soars above / What the world calls misfortune and affliction. / These are not ills; else would they never fall / On Heaven’s first favourites, and the best of men. / The gods, in bounty, work up storms about us, / That give mankind occasion to exert / Their hidden strength, and throw out into practice  / Virtues, which shun the day, and lie concealed / In the smooth seasons and the calms of life.” 237. P: “Fame.” The expected apostrophe is lacking in the copy text. 239. Among various presentations of this line’s accidentals, 1734a has “Just what you hear you have, and what’s unknown,” suggesting that fame is only something one hears one has, rather than that one has just as much of it as one hears one has. 240. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 bc), orator, politician, and philosopher whose works are frequently cited in these notes. His writings import Greek philosophical traditions, including Stoicism, to the Roman world. His philosophical, rhetorical, and forensic works were widely studied in formal education throughout post*

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alex ander pope All that we feel of it begins and ends In the small circle of our foes or friends; To all beside as much an empty shade, An Eugene living, as a Cæsar dead, Alike or when, or where, they shone, or shine, Or on the Rubicon, or on the Rhine. A Wit’s a feather, and a Chief a rod; An honest Man’s the noblest work of God. Fame but from death a villain’s name can save, As Justice tears his body from the grave, When what t’oblivion better were resign’d, Is hung on high, to poison half mankind. All fame is foreign, but of true desert, Plays round the head, but comes not to the heart: *

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Renaissance Europe. In Pope’s Temple of Fame, in the portion of the temple dedicated to the greatest minds of antiquity, Cicero’s place is described after that accorded to Aristotle, lines 238–43, TE II,258: “With equal Rays immortal Tully shone,  / The Roman Rostra deck’d the Consul’s Throne: / Gath’ring his flowing Robe, he seem’d to stand, / In Act to speak, and graceful, stretch’d his Hand: / Behind, Rome’s Genius waits with Civic Crowns, / And the Great Father of his Country owns.” 244. Eugène of Savoy (1663–1736) joined the Austrian army in 1683 in response to the siege of Vienna by the Turks and had an illustrious career. He worked with the Duke of Marlborough in the War of Spanish Succession (1701–13). 237–46. In Alessandro Tassoni, La Secchia Rapita: �e Trophy-Bucket, trans. by John Ozell (London, 1713), p. 59, Pallas and Phoebus descend to unite a region, “Whatever ties the Rubicon and Rhine,” in a war to reclaim the bucket. The region comprises all land between northern Italy and the course of the Rhine from Switzerland to the coast of the Netherlands. On fame, see Wollaston, p. 117–18: “Thirst after glory, when that is desired merely for its own sake, is founded in ambition and vanity: the thing itself is but a dream, and imagination; since, according to the differing humors and sentiments of nations and ages, the same thing may be either glorious or inglorious: the effect of it, considered still by itself, is neither more health, nor estate, nor knowledge, nor virtue to him who has it; or if that be any thing, it is but what must cease when the man dies: and, after all, as it lives but in the breath of the people, a little sly envy or a new turn of things extinguishes it, or perhaps it goes quite out of itself. Men please themselves with notions of immortality and fancy a perpetuity of fame secured to themselves by books and testimonies of historians: but, alas! it is a stupid delusion, when they imagin themselves present, and injoying that fame at the reading of their story after their death. And, beside, in reality the man is not known ever the more to posterity, because his name is transmitted to them: he doth not live, because his name does. [ . . . ] fame is mere air.” *

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One self-approving hour whole years out-weighs Of stupid starers, and of loud huzzas; And more true joy Marcellus exil’d feels, Than Cæsar with a senate at his heels. In Parts superior what advantage lies? Tell (for You can) what is it to be wise? ’Tis but to know how little can be known; To see all others faults, and feel our own: Condemn’d in bus’ness or in arts to drudge Without a second, or without a judge: Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land?

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257. Marcus Claudius Marcellus (?–45 bc) was an opponent of Julius Caesar, but did not participate actively in the civil war and after the Battle of Pharsalus retired to Mytilene, an island off the Greek mainland, where he studied rhetoric and philosophy. He was murdered at Piraeus. 258. Julius Caesar. See I.159n. 237–58. The whole paragraph bears a strong resemblance to Cicero, Dream, pp. 143–45, VI:12–VII:17 (20–25): “What sort of fame, or what glory that is desirable, can you achieve through the talk of mankind? [ . . . ] Even those who do talk about us, for how long will they talk? Indeed, even if that generation of men yet to be born will be eager to hand on in turn to its descendants the praises of each one of us, which they have heard from their fathers, nevertheless, because of the floods and conflagrations of the world, which inevitably must happen at their appointed time, we cannot achieve glory that lasts for any length of time, let alone eternally. And what difference does it make to you, that there will be talk about you among those who will be born in the future, when there was none among those born before you, who were no fewer and certainly better men?—especially since even among those who may come to hear our names, no man can achieve fame that lasts as long as a year? [ . . . ] Wherefore, if you abandon hope of a return into this place, in which is the whole reward of great and eminent men, what is now the value of that mortal fame, which can hardly endure even for a small part of one year? But if you will look upwards and fix your thoughts on this habitation and eternal home, neither placing yourself at the mercy of the common talk of men, nor putting your hopes for the future in human rewards, then Virtue herself must draw you by her own enticements towards true glory. Let it be for others to decide what they will say about you; say it they will; but all that talk is confined by that small region which you see, nor has it ever been eternal about any man; it is buried when men die, and is extinguished in the forgetfulness of posterity.” 259. P: “Superior Parts.” 264. BL C.122.e.31 corrects to “Without a Second, nay without a Judge.” 265. Prior, I,95, “To Dr. Sherlock, on his Practical Discourse Concerning Death,” lines 44–45: “You wrest the Bolt from Heav’n’s avenging Hand, / Stop ready Death, *

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alex ander pope All fear, none aid you, and few understand. Painful preheminence! yourself to view Above life’s weakness, and its comforts too. Bring then these blessings to a strict account, Make fair deductions, see to what they mount. How much of other each is sure to cost; How each for other oft is wholly lost; How inconsistent greater goods with these; How sometimes life is risqu’d, and always ease: Think, and if still the things thy envy call, Say, would’st thou be the Man to whom they fall? To sigh for ribbands if thou art so silly, Mark how they grace Lord Umbra, or Sir Billy: Is yellow dirt the passion of thy life? Look but on Gripus, or on Gripus’ wife: If Parts allure thee, think how Bacon shin’d, The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind: *

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and save a sinking Land.” Thomas Tickell, A Poem to His Excellency the Lord PrivySeal on the Prospect of Peace (London, 1713), p. 18: “Our Oxford ’s Earl in careful Thought shall stand, / To raise his Queen, and save a sinking Land.” 267. Addison, III, p. 35, Cato speaking: “Which of you all suspects that he is wronged? / Or thinks he suffers greater ills than Cato? / Am I distinguished from you but by toils, / Superior toils, and heavier weight of cares? / Painful pre-eminence!” 278. Umbra: shade, shadow, ghost (Latin). A quixotic narrative by William Winstanley, �e Essex Champion, or, �e Famous History of Sir Billy of Billerecay and his Squire Ricardo (London, 1699), p. 201, features the hero being given a ribbon to pin on his arm by a judge’s daughter, as he is about to go into combat with a coroner. 269–80. The periphrase “yellow dirt” seems to have been a common way of implying magnanimous contempt in referring to gold. Mark Frank, LI Sermons (London, 1672), p. 285, asks those “that have led a course of sin [. . . to] sit down and reckon every one of you with himself, what you have gotten [ . . . ] all for a few minutes of pleasure, for a little white and yellow dirt, for a feather, or a fly, a buzze of honour or applause, a fansie, or a humour.” Robert Gould, “The Play-House, a Satyr,” in �e Works of Mr. Robert Gould, II,258: “In Contemplation rapt above the Skies, / We look on Yellow Dirt with heedless Eyes: / What truly Christian Bard would Gold adore, / When he may teach Contentment to the Poor.” 280. Gripus is a Latinization of “grip” or “gripe” and suggests unwillingness to part with money. 281–82. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was a politician, counselor to James I and VI, *

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Or ravish’d with the whistling of a Name, See Cromwell, damn’d to everlasting fame! If all, united, thy ambition call, From ancient story learn to scorn them all. There, in the rich, the honour’d, fam’d, and great, See the false scale of Happiness complete! In hearts of Kings, or arms of Queens who lay, How happy! those to ruin, these betray, Mark by what wretched steps their glory grows, From dirt and sea-weed as proud Venice rose; In each how guilt and greatness equal ran, And all that rais’d the Hero, sunk the Man. Now Europe’s laurels on their brows behold, But stain’d with blood, or ill exchang’d for gold, Then see them broke with toils, or sunk in ease, Or infamous for plunder’d provinces. Oh wealth ill-fated! which no act of fame E’er taught to shine, or sanctify’d from shame! What greater bliss attends their close of life? Some greedy minion, or imperious wife, The trophy’d arches, story’d halls invade, *

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and became attorney general in 1613. He was an early participant in the movement to reform the methodology of the natural and human sciences. See introduction, pp. liv–lv, for his connection to the Essay. 1734a has Wh** for Philip James Wharton, Duke of Wharton (1698–1731) in place of Bacon, with his name repeated in the second line of the couplet: “Wh**, the Shame and Scandal of mankind.” Wharton was strongly associated with the Jacobite cause from 1716, raising military support in continental Europe for placing James Stuart on the throne. He lacked restraint, was profligate, converted to Catholicism to marry, and was disrespectful of most forms of authority. He is the subject of Epistle to Cobham, lines 174–207, TE III.ii,28–31, where his ruling passion is said to be lust of praise. 284. Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) was lord protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland after leading the successful parliamentarian campaign against Charles I. The parliamentarian cause promoted the authority of the Houses of Parliament as against that of the monarch. His damnation here is as a regicide, which Pope is likely to have thought of as a transgression of one’s proper place in the great scheme. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, with which the Essay shares the ambition of vindicating God’s ways to man, Cromwell is associated with Satan’s transgressions. Spence, I,243, no. 585, records an anecdote concerning Cromwell and Charles I that Pope told in 1744. *

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alex ander pope And haunt their slumbers in the pompous shade. Alas! not dazzled with their noon-tide ray, Compute the morn and ev’ning to the day; The whole amount of that enormous fame, A Tale, that blends their glory with their shame! VII. Know then this truth (enough for Man to know) “Virtue alone is Happiness below.” The only point where human bliss stands still, And tastes the good without the fall to ill; Where only Merit constant pay receives, Is blest in what it takes, and what it gives; The joy unequal’d, if its end it gain, And if it lose, attended with no pain: Without satiety, tho’ e’er so blest, And but more relish’d as the more distress’d: The broadest mirth unfeeling Folly wears, Less pleasing far than Virtue’s very tears. Good, from each object, from each place acquir’d, For ever exercis’d, yet never tir’d; Never elated, while one man’s oppress’d; Never dejected, while another’s bless’d; *

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310. P: “�at Virtue only constitutes a Happiness, whose Object is Universal, and whose Prospect Eternal.” 1735b onward mark the line with inverted commas. Identification of virtue with happiness has been associated with the Stoics. Henry Needler, �e Works of Henry Needler (London, 1724), p. 319: “The Stoicks indeed thought Virtue alone sufficient to Happiness; and thence concluded, That since it is in Every Man’s Power to be Virtuous, it is also in Every Man’s Power to be Happy. But, alas! every Day’s Experience too clearly proves the Vanity of this Notion.” John Cooke, �irty Nine Sermons on Several Occasions, 2 vols. (London, 1729), I,42: “Ipsa sui virtus pretium sibi, the cold principle of the Stoicks, that virtue alone could purchase this happiness.” The quotation is adapted from Seneca, II,122–23, “De vita beata,” 9.4: “Interrogas, quid petam ex virtute? Ipsam. Nihil enim habet melius, ipsa pretium sui. / Do you ask what it is that I seek in virtue? Only herself. For she offers nothing better—she herself is her own reward.” See also 16.1, II,140–41: “in virtute posita est vera felicitas. / true happiness is founded upon virtue.” 313. Punctuation of this line in, e.g., 1734a clarifies the sense: “Where only, Merit constant pay receives.” That is, virtue is the only point at which merit is constantly rewarded; and not that only merit is constantly rewarded at the point of virtue. *

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And where no wants, no wishes can remain, Since but to wish more Virtue, is to gain. See! the sole bliss Heav’n could on all bestow; Which who but feels can taste, but thinks can know: Yet poor with fortune, and with learning blind, The bad must miss; the good, untaught, will find; Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks thro’ Nature, up to Nature’s God; Pursues that Chain which links th’immense design, Joins heav’n and earth, and mortal and divine; Sees, that no being any bliss can know, But touches some above, and some below; Learns, from this union of the rising Whole, The first, last purpose of the human soul; And knows where Faith, Law, Morals, all began, All end, in Love of God, and Love of Man. For him alone, Hope leads from goal to goal, And opens still, and opens on his soul, ’Till lengthen’d on to Faith, and unconfin’d, It pours the bliss that fills up all the mind. He sees, why Nature plants in Man alone Hope of known bliss, and Faith in bliss unknown:

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alex ander pope (Nature, whose dictates to no other kind Are giv’n in vain, but what they seek they find) Wise is her present; she connects in this His greatest Virtue with his greatest Bliss, At once his own bright prospect to be blest, And strongest motive to assist the rest. Self-love thus push’d to social, to divine, Gives thee to make thy neighbour’s blessing thine. Is this too little for the boundless heart? Extend it, let thy enemies have part: Grasp the whole worlds of Reason, Life, and Sense, In one close system of Benevolence: Happier as kinder, in whate’er degree, And height of Bliss but height of Charity. God loves from Whole to Parts: But human soul Must rise from Individual to the Whole. Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake, As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake; The centre mov’d, a circle strait succeeds, Another still, and still another spreads, Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace, His country next, and next all human race, Wide and more wide, th’o’erflowings of the mind Take ev’ry creature in, of ev’ry kind; Earth smiles around, with boundless bounty blest, And Heav’n beholds its image in his breast. *

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both these Graces heightens and enflames,  / And to eternal Bliss sounds all your Claims.” 347–48. Rochester, “Artemiza to Chloe,” lines 252–53: “Nature, who never made a thinge in vayne, / But does each Insect to some ende ordeyne.” 361–68. Cicero, On Duties, p. 57 (I.xvii), moves in the opposite direction to Pope: “Starting with that infinite bond of union of the human race in general, the conception is now confined to a small and narrow circle.” 363–72. Bacon, Essayes, “Of Wisdome for a Mans Selfe,” p. 61: “Divide with reason betweene Self-love, and Society: And be so true to thy Selfe, as thou be not false to Others; Specially to thy King and Country. It is a poore Center of a Mans Actions, Himselfe. It is right Earth. For that onely stands fast upon his owne Center; Whereas *

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Come then, my Friend, my Genius, come along, Oh master of the poet, and the song! And while the Muse now stoops, or now ascends, To Man’s low passions, or their glorious ends, Teach me, like thee, in various nature wise, To fall with dignity, with temper rise; Form’d by thy converse, happily to steer From grave to gay, from lively to severe; Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease, Intent to reason, or polite to please. Oh! while along the stream of Time thy name Expanded flies, and gathers all its fame, Say, shall my little bark attendant sail, Pursue the triumph, and partake the gale? When statesmen, heroes, kings, in dust repose, Whose sons shall blush their fathers were thy foes, Shall then this verse to future age pretend Thou wert my guide, philosopher, and friend? That urg’d by thee, I turn’d the tuneful art From sounds to things, from fancy to the heart; For Wit’s false mirror held up Nature’s light; Shew’d erring Pride, whatever is, is right;

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all Things, that have Affinity with the Heavens, move upon the Center of another, which they benefit.” Dunciad (1728), in �e Poems of Alexander Pope III: �e Dunciad (1728) & �e Dunciad Variorum (1729), ed. by Valerie Rumbold (Harlow: Longman, 2007), p. 78, II.361–6, comparing the dropping of a turd into a pond and the spreading of sleep over a company: “As what a Dutchman plumps into the lakes, / One circle first, and then a second makes, / What Dulness dropt among her sons imprest / Like motion, from one circle to the rest; / So from the mid-most the nutation spreads / Round, and more round o’er all the sea of heads.” I take this parallel from Katherine M. Quinsey, “Dualities of the Divine in Pope’s Essay on Man and the Dunciad,” in Religion in the Age of Reason: A Transatlantic Study of the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. by Kathryn Duncan (New York: AMS Press, 2009), pp. 135–57 (pp. 150–51). 373–82. MLM (234–35) and HLM (LGA 340–41) present a draft of these lines as the opening to Epistle II. The revisions are not radical but demonstrate the improvements Pope brought into his versification. The close of Epistle II in HLM also contains a more extended draft of the passage (LGA 366–67). 387–88. Variation: “Omitted by mistake in the Folio Edition.” *

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alex ander pope That Reason, Passion, answer one great aim; That true Self-love and Social are the same; That Virtue only makes our Bliss below; And all our Knowledge is, ourselves to know.

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POPE’S K NOW LEDGE OF AUTHORS CITED Joseph Addison: Pope wrote a prologue to Addison’s Cato, and attended the opening night with him and other friends, TE VI,96– 98 and Corr., I,174–76. Cato is FL 1, CiH 395. Pope had apparently seen the work in MS and advised Addison to print it rather than have it acted, Spence, I,64, no. 153. Aristotle: Pope refers to Aristotle’s Ethics in a note in MLM (LGA 238–39, and see Essay II.122n). Francis Atterbury: features in Pope’s list of models for prose style, Spence, I,170, no. 389. Pope and Atterbury were friends. Their correspondence includes Atterbury’s sending writings to Pope from his exile in France, 23 November 1731, Corr., III,245–46. Saint Augustine: Pope approvingly cites a text attributed to St. Augustine, Corr., I,119, Pope to Caryll, 18 June 1711. The Confessions are cited at Odyssey, VII.109n, TE IX,239. Marcus Aurelius: is named in the Essay IV.235 and in �e Temple of Fame, lines 165–67, TE II,255: “wise Aurelius, in whose well-taught Mind  / With boundless Pow’r unbounded Virtue join’d, / His own strict Judge, and Patron of Mankind.” Francis Bacon: features in Pope’s list of models for prose style, Spence, I,170, no. 389. Pope said, “Lord Bacon was the greatest genius that England, or perhaps any other country, ever produced.” Spence, I,186, no. 431. He is mentioned frequently in poems by Pope. �e Advancement of Learning and Essays are FL11 and 12, CiH 396–97. Richard Bentley: Pope was highly critical of Bentley, presenting him as a small-minded philologist, as in Pope to the Earl of Oxford, 7 November 1731, Corr., III,241; and as beneath all criticism (in contrast to Milton, who was above it), Pope to Tonson Sr., 7 June 1732, Corr., III,291; frequent mentions in the Dunciad are to the same effect. 99

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George Berkeley: Pope and Berkeley corresponded from the 1710s. Pope prefers Berkeley’s Alciphron to a book by Dr. Delany in Bolingbroke and Pope to Swift, March 1731/32, Corr., III,276. Pope said he omitted “an address to our Saviour, imitated from Lucretius’ compliment to Epicurus” from the Essay on the advice of Berkeley, Spence, I,135, no. 305. Richard Blackmore: Pope to John Hughes, 19 April 1714, Corr., I,218, asks Hughes to give his service to Blackmore, who later features extensively in the Dunciad and Peri Bathous. Pope compares the planning of his poem on Alcander favorably to that of Blackmore’s Prince Arthur, Spence, I,17, no. 38. Boethius: Pope translated a portion of book III of �e Consolation of Philosophy, TE VI,73. Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux: reference is made in the Corr. to several works by Boileau, who is named in An Essay on Criticism, line 714, TE I,323, and elsewhere in Pope’s works. FL 24–26, CiH 399. Robert Boyle: mentioned in Pope’s “Artemisia,” an imitation of Charles Dorset, line 3, TE VI,48. A medical work is FL 27, CiH 399. Thomas Burnet: appears in a list Swift makes of Pope’s enemies (“Curl, Gildon, Squire Burnet, Blackmore, and a few others”) in Swift to Pope, 30 August 1716, Corr., I,358. He is mentioned at Dunciad B III.179n, TE V,329. Pierre Charron: Pope, Epistle to Cobham, lines 146–47, TE III.ii,26: “What made (say Montagne, or more sage Charron!)  / Otho a warrior, Cromwell a buffoon?” Cicero: numerous works by Cicero are cited throughout Corr. by Pope and others. He is named in the Essay at IV.240. FL 37–38, CiH 401–2. Samuel Clarke: mentioned (disparagingly) in the Epistle to Burlington, line 78 (added in 1744) and n, TE III.ii,140. Pope disapproves of Clarke’s “platonizing” of religion, Spence, I,135, no. 304. Claudian: Pope imitated Claudian in the early epic poem on Alcander he subsequently destroyed, Spence, I,18, no. 40. Jeremy Collier: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Pope, 14 September 1716, Corr. I,362, implies Pope’s knowledge of Collier’s Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. Pope thinks

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Collier’s lighter style poorly applied to his translation of Aurelius, Spence, I,204, 478. Ralph Cudworth: the True Intellectual System of the Universe is FL 42, CiH 405. John Donne: Pope “versified” Donne’s satires, TE IV. He preferred Donne’s epistles, satires, and Metempsychosis, Spence, I,188, no. 436. John Dryden: Pope regarded Dryden as a true poet, of the rank of Shakespeare and Milton, keeping their portraits in his chamber to remind himself of his place in relation to them, Pope to Caryll, 25 June 1711, Corr., I,120. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Dryden are regarded as the great landmarks of English poetry, Spence, I,178, no. 410. FL 58–60, CiH 410–11. Empedocles: Iliad, XVIII.537n, TE VIII,348: “Empedocles seems to have taken from Homer his Assertion, that all Things had their Original from Strife and Friendship.” Epictetus: Pope owned a book containing work by Epictetus: FL 127, CiH 432. Desiderius Erasmus: Pope was said to have been fond of Erasmus’s principles in religion right up to his death, Spence, I,261, no. 630n. “Yet am I of the Religion of Erasmus, a Catholick,” Pope to Swift, 28 November 1729, Corr., III,81. Imitations of Horace, Sat.II.i, lines 65–66, TE IV,11: “Papist or Protestant, or both between, / Like good Erasmus in an honest Mean.” François de Fénelon: Pope says his views are conformable to those of Fénelon and Pascal, Pope to Louis Racine, 1 September 1742, Corr., IV,416. Pope “read Telemachus with pleasure,” Spence, I,222, no. 524. The Telemachus in French and English is FL 63–64, CiH 412. Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea: Pope dined with Finch to hear a play (possibly one of hers) read, Pope to Caryll, 15 December 1713, Corr., I,203. They engaged in an exchange of verses, TE VI,120–22. John Gay: Gay and Pope to Swift, 1 December 1731, contains reference to Gay’s writing of fables, Corr., III,248. Charles Gildon: Pope says he will let Gildon’s “nasty Slanders” pass, Pope and Bolingbroke to Swift, 14 December 1725, Corr., II,349. He is mentioned at Epistle to Arbuthnot, line 151, TE IV,107.

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Thomas Hobbes: features in Pope’s list of models for prose style, Spence, I,170, no. 389. His manner of reasoning is compared favorably to the ancients, Spence, I,226, no. 535. Pope was familiar with Hobbes’s translation of Homer, Pope to Ralph Bridges, 5 April 1708, Corr., I,43, and notes throughout the translation of Homer. Hobbes’s Leviathan is FL 82, CiH 414. Horace: Pope’s knowledge is attested throughout his work, most evidently in his Imitations of Horace, TE IV. FL 90–93, CiH 419. Pierre Daniel Huet: Atterbury to Pope, 26 March 1721, Corr., II,74, mentions a MS by Huet. He is cited at Odyssey, XVI.238n, TE X,116. FL 95, CiH 419 Justus Lipsius: Pope refers to Lipsius’s epistles in his marginal comments in his copy of Cotton’s translation of Montaigne, FL 121, CiH 426–31. John Locke: features in Pope’s list of models for prose style, Spence, I,170, no. 389. Pope said he found Locke insipid but elsewhere places him alongside Bacon as an original philosophical thinker, Spence, I,19, no. 42, and I,187, no. 432. FL 105, CiH 423. Lucan, trans. by Nicholas Rowe: Cromwell to Pope, 5 December 1710, Corr., I,108, discusses Rowe’s translation. FL 107, CiH 423. Lucretius: Pope compares Creech’s translations of Manilius and Lucretius, Spence, I,205, no. 479. A Latin text is FL 110, CiH 423. Nicolas Malebranche: Pope mentions Locke and Malebranche as representative metaphysicians, Pope and Bolingbroke to Swift, 15 September 1734, Corr., III,433. Manilius: Pope compares Creech’s translations of Manilius and Lucretius, Spence, I,205, no. 479. Creech’s translation is FL 112, CiH 423–24. Martial: Pope frequently quotes Martial in Corr. Pope wrote an imitation of 10.23, TE VI,166–67. FL 113, CiH 424. John Milton: Pope frequently cited Milton in his letters and was lending his poems to others while in his teens, Sir William Trumbull to Pope, 19 October 1705, Corr., I,10. Pope held him in the highest esteem as a poet (see entry for Dryden in this list). FL 115–18, CiH 424–25. Michel de Montaigne: Pope’s extensive annotations on his copy of Charles Cotton’s translation are recorded by MM at FL 121, CiH 426–31.

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Pierre Nicole: Pope to Caryll, 1 May 1720, Corr., II,43, singles out the essay on human weakness from Nicole’s Moral Essays. John Oldham: Rochester and Oldham are compared by Pope, Spence, I,201–2, nos. 470–72. Pope includes “To the Memory of my Dear Friend, Mr. Charles Morwent” in a list of Oldham’s best poems in his copy, which is one of several volumes bound together, FL 122–25, CiH 431–32. Oppian: cited by Pope at Essay III.177n. Blaise Pascal: Pope approves of Caryll’s recommendation of the Pensées, “tho’ I’ve been beforehand with you in it,” Pope to Caryll, 6 February 1730/31, Corr., III,173. Plutarch: see Tom Jones, “Pope and Translations of Plutarch’s Moralia,” Translation and Literature 12:2 (2003): 263–73. Plutarch is cited frequently in the notes to Homer, TE VII–X. Polybius: for Pope’s borrowing Polybius from Trumbull, see George Sherburn, “Letters of Alexander Pope, Chiefly to Sir William Trumbull,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 9 (1958): 388–406. Matthew Prior: Pope had examined Prior’s MS works, and compared them to his published writings, Spence, I,91–92, nos. 211–12, and Pope to Harley, 29 September 1723, Corr., II,203. FL 138, CiH 437. François, duc de La Rochefoucauld: Pope advises Wycherley to imitate Rochefoucauld’s maxims in prose, 29 November 1707, Corr., I,34. MM (LGA 308) identifies the Frenchman mentioned in MS lines in MLM as Rochefoucauld. See Essay II.230n. Pope opposes his sense of the relation of virtue and vice to La Rochefoucauld’s, Spence, I,219, no. 515. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: Rochester and Oldham are compared by Pope, Spence, I,201–2, nos. 470–72. Rochester is compared to Cicero at Epistle to Cobham, line 187, TE III.ii,29. An annotated copy of Rochester’s poems from 1696 is FL 144, CiH 437–38. Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon: Roscommon’s writerly talents and virtue are mentioned at Essay on Criticism, line 725, TE I,324. George Savile, Marquis of Halifax: Pope to Burlington, 6 November 1732, and Pope to the Countess of Burlington, 13 January 1732/33, indicate Pope’s work in organizing an edition of the unpublished

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MSS of Savile, Corr., III,328–29, 341. See also �e Works of George Savile Marquis of Halifax, ed. by Mark N. Brown, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), II,123–27. Madeleine de Scudéry: Pope sent Scudéry’s �e Grand Cyrus to Martha Blount, November 1716, Corr., I,375. Seneca: Pope frequently quotes Seneca in Corr. Seneca’s tragedies are FL 148, CiH 439. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury: Pope set text from Characteristics as blank verse at Dunciad IV.488n, TE V,389–90. Algernon Sidney: Pope inspected MS letters of Algernon Sidney at the same time as the MSS of Savile (see entry under Savile in this list). Suetonius: Pope demonstrates knowledge of Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars in a letter to Henry Cromwell, 24 June 1710, Corr., I,90. Torquato Tasso: Aminta is discussed in letters between Pope and William Walsh, 24 June and 2 July 1706, Corr., I,18–19. His epic style is discussed in the prefatory note to �e Temple of Fame, TE II,244. Alessandro Tassoni: La Secchia Rapita is widely recognized as a source for �e Rape of the Lock, but I have found no direct reference to Tassoni. Jeremy Taylor: Holy Living and Holy Dying is mentioned in a letter in Pope’s hand, To a Lady from her Brother, 10 February 1714/15, Corr., I,277. Taylor is mentioned in “Sylvia, A Fragment,” line 13, TE VI,287. William Temple: features in Pope’s list of models for prose style, Spence, I,170, no. 389. Pope read Temple early but did not enjoy his political work (meaning probably the contributions to diplomatic history in the Works), Spence, I,19, no. 42. Pope cites the essay on government in a MS note to Essay III.303–4, reproduced in this edition; he cites another of Temple’s essays when writing to the Earl of Oxford, 15 September 1729, Corr., III,53. James Thomson: Pope and Thomson were acquainted. FL 160, CiH 443. Thomas Tickell: Tickell and Pope were both publishing translations of Homer in the mid-1710s. A heavily annotated copy of the first

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volume of Tickell’s Iliad is FL 163, CiH 443–56. He is named in “Umbra,” line 14, TE VI,140. John Tillotson: features in Pope’s list of models for prose style, Spence, I,170, no. 389. John Toland: mentioned at Dunciad B, II.399, TE V,316, and in HLM (LGA 364–65, see Essay II.262n). Voltaire: Pope to Bolingbroke, 9 April 1724, Corr., II,228–29, offers detailed commentary on Voltaire’s poem �e League. William Wollaston: cited in a MS note in MLM (LGA 298–99, see Essay IV.83–98n). William Wycherley: some of Pope’s earliest correspondence (e.g., Wycherley to Pope, 25 January 1704/5, Corr., I,13) concerns his revision of Wycherley’s poems. “Autumn” from Pope’s Pastorals, TE I,80, was dedicated to Wycherley. Edward Young: Young wrote to Pope. Copies of Young’s poems, including Imperium Pelagi, are FL 173–76, CiH 460.

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Taylor, Jeremy. Antiquitates christianæ. London, 1675. ———. XXV Sermons Preached at Golden-Grove Being for the Winter Half-Year. London, 1653. Temple, William. Miscellanea. London, 1680. ———. �e Works of Sir William Temple. 2 vols. London, 1720. Theobald, John. “A Funeral Poem.” In Poems on Several Occasions. London, 1719. Thomson, James. �e Seasons and �e Castle of Indolence. Ed. by James Sambrook. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Tickell, Thomas. A Poem to His Excellency the Lord Privy-Seal on the Prospect of Peace. London, 1713. Tillotson, John. Sermons Preach’d Upon Several Occasions. 2nd ed. London, 1673. Toland, John. Clito: A Poem on �e Force of Eloquence. London, 1700. Tyrrell, James. A Brief Disquisition of the Law of Nature According to the Principles and Method Laid Down in the Reverend Dr. Cumberland’s [ . . . ] Latin Treatise on that Subject. London, 1692. Voltaire. Correspondence and Related Documents III, May 1734–June 1736, Letters D731–D1106. Ed. by Theodore Besterman. The Complete Works of Voltaire 87. Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969. ———. Correspondence and Related Documents XVII, January 1756– March 1757, Letters D6664–D7222. Ed. by Theodore Besterman. The Complete Works of Voltaire 101. Banbury, Oxfordshire: The Voltaire Foundation, 1971. ———. Lettres philosophiques. Ed. by Gustave Lanson and André M. Rousseau. 2 vols. Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier, 1964. ———. Philosophical Letters. Trans. by Ernest Dilworth. (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961. Warburton, William. A Critical and Philosophical Commentary on Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man. London, 1742. Warton, Joseph. An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Alexander Pope. 2nd ed. 2 vols. London, 1762–82. Watson, Thomas. A Body of Practical Divinity. London, 1692. Whichcote, Benjamin. Select Sermons. London, 1698. Winstanley, William. �e Essex Champion, or, �e Famous History of Sir Billy of Billerecay and his Squire Ricardo. London, 1699.

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Wishart, William. �e Certain and Unchangeable Difference Betwixt Moral Good and Evil. London, 1732. Wollaston, William. �e Religion of Nature Delineated. London, 1724. Wycherley, William. Miscellany Poems. London, 1704. ———. �e Posthumous Works of William Wycherley Esq; In Prose and Verse. London, 1728. Young, Edward. Imperium Pelagi. London, 1730.

Secondary Sources Audra, Emile. L’Influence française dans l’oeuvre de Pope. Paris: Champion, 1931. Beaumont, Charles M. “The Rising and Falling Metaphor in Pope’s Essay on Man.” Style 1 (1967): 121–30. Brown, Laura. Alexander Pope. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Cartwright, David Edgar. Tides: A Scientific History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Cassirer, Ernst. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. Toronto: Bantam, 1970. First publ. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944. Colie, Rosalie. “John Locke and the Publication of the Private.” Philological Quarterly 45 (1966): 22–45. Connell, P. J. Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Damrosch, Leopold, Jr. �e Imaginative World of Alexander Pope. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Erskine-Hill, Howard. “Pope on the Origins of Society.” In �e Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays, ed. by G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers, pp. 79–93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Force, James E. “Holy Grail, (Almost) Wholly Newton: A Guide to the Newtonian and Anti-Newtonian Elements in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man.” Enlightenment and Dissent 25, “Isaac Newton in the Eighteenth Century,” ed. by Stephen D. Snobelen (2009): 106–34. Foxon, D. F. English Verse 1701–1750: A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

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INDEX Abbadie, Jacques, lxix Addison, Joseph, xxix, 56–57.77, 89.233– 36, 92.267; Cato, lxxxi, 6.6, 99 Alexander the Great, 18.160, 88.220 Allen, Ralph, xcv Arbuthnot, John, 57.84, 84.130 Argyle, Duke of, 47.262 Aristotle, 48.269–70; Ethics, 38.122, 99 Astell, Mary, Letters, 39.131 Atterbury, Francis, xlviii, 99, 102; Sermons and Discourses, 56–57.77 Augustine, xxxiii, 79.69–70; Confessions, 99 Aurelius, Marcus, lxxxvi, 24–25.268, 26.289–92, 37.101–2, 52.9, 99, 101; Meditations, 89.235 Auther, John, “The Weakness of our Faculties,” 6.6, 52.9

Bayle, Pierre, lxiii Beaumont, Charles M., “The Rising and Falling Metaphor,” xlv–xlvin42 Belsunce de Castelmoron, Henri François Xavier de, bishop of Marseille, 82.107–8 Bentley, Richard, 99; A Sermon, 23.244 Berkeley, George, xxv–xxvi, xxvin16, lxxxviii, 23.233–41; Alciphron, 52.9, 100; Passive Obedience, 83–84.127–28; A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 26.289–92, 44.205–10 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 58.104 Berselli, Matteo, 58.104 Bethel, Hugh, xlviii, 83.126 Blackmore, Richard: Creation, 33.47; Prince Arthur, 29.17, 100 Bodin, Jean, The Six Bookes of a Common-Weale, 69.294 Boethius, xxxi, 17.147, 52.7–14, 65.217, 79.67–72, 80.83; The Consolation of Philosophy, xliii–xliv, 80.89, 100; and Leibniz, lx; and poverty, xci; prose and verse of, xviii Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, xxix, 100; Satire IV, 40–41.145–47, 43.195–96; Satire V, 87–88.207–8 Bold, Henry, “To His Sacred Majesty,” 31.27–28 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Viscount, xcii, 75.18, 100; career of, 6.1; and composition of EM, xlvii, xlviii– xlix, lxxxvii–xc; correspondence of, xlvii, lii, 101, 102, 105; Dissertation on Parties, xlix; “Fragments or Minutes of Essays,” lxxxvii–xc; “Letters or Essays Addressed to Alexander

Bacon, Francis, lvi, 3, 92–93.281–82, 102; The Advancement of Learning, liv–lv, 59.123–24, 99; and Bolingbroke, lxxxviii; Essayes, 99; Essayes, “Of Vicissitude of Things,” 22.234; Essayes, “Of Wisdome for a Mans Selfe,” 96–97.363–72; and human concerns, liv–lv; “Of Simulation and Dissimulation,” liv; philosophical essayism and inquiry of, xxii; prose of, xxix Baglivi, Giorgio, The Practice of Physick, 16.142 Baker, Henry, The Microscope Made Easy, 20.193–96 Balguy, John, Divine Rectitude, lxxxin93 Bathurst, Lord, lxxxviiin98 Baxter, Richard, The Practical Works, 34–35.59

123

124

Index

Bolingbroke (cont.) Pope, Esq.,” lxxxvii–xc; and Pope’s reading, xxix–xxx; virtue of, lxxxvi; Voltaire on, cii Borgia, Cesare, xxxviii, 17.156 Boyle, Robert, 100; New Experiments, 30.19–20 Bridges, Ralph, 102 Brocklesby, Richard, An Explication of the Gospel, 52.9 Brown, Laura, xvii, xxxv Browne, Joseph, “The Gothick Hero,” 84.135 Browne, Peter, The Procedure, 29.17 Brutus, 43.194 Buber, Martin, I and Thou, lxxxvin97 Burnet, Thomas, 100; The Theory of the Earth, 56–57.77 Burthogge, Richard, Of the Soul, 78.62 Bury, Arthur, The Rational Deist, 69.288 Butler, Joseph, lviii, lxxii–lxxiii, 37.101– 2; The Works of Bishop Butler, lxxviiin87 Caesar, Gaius Julius, 18.159, 91.257, 91.258 Calvin, Jean, lxxxiii, 84.137 Campbell, Archibald, An Enquiry into the Original of Moral Virtue, 61.149 Campbell family, 47.262 Carter, Elizabeth, xcii Cartwright, David Edgar, Tides, 30.19– 20 Caryll, John, lii–liii, lix, xciii, 99, 101, 103 Cassirer, Ernst: An Essay on Man, cviii– cxi; The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, cviii Catilina, Lucius Sergius, xxxviii, 17.156 Cato, xxxviii, 37.101–2, 89.233–36, 92.267 Chambers, Ephraim, Cyclopaedia, 10– 11.60, 30.19–20, 41.159–60 Charles I, 93.284 Charles XII of Sweden, 88.220 Charron, Pierre, 100; Of Wisdom, lv, lxx Charteris, Francis, 84.130

Chaucer, Geoffrey, xxxi, 72.317, 101 Cherbury, Edward, Lord Herbert of, “A Meditation,” 78.62 Cheselden, William, The Anatomy of the Humane Body, 21–22.213 Chudleigh, Mary, Lady: “The Ladies Defence,” 40.138; “Of Pride,” 23.233– 42, 88.205–16; “Of Self-Love,” 74.1– 6; “To Clorissa,” 56.69 Cicero, xxviin20, lxxii, lxxiii, 89– 90.240, 100, 103; Dream of Scipio, 14.102, 91.237–58; On Duties, 30.19– 20, 34.53–92, 65.209–14, 72.318, 96.361–68; On Friendship, 81.95–96; Laelius, On Friendship, 6.1; Tully’s Offices, 62.170 Clarke, Samuel, 17.147, 22.234, 24.268, 53.13–14, 100 Claudian, xxi, 100; Against Rufinus, xviii–xx Clendon, John, Tractatus, lxxxvin97 Colie, Rosalie, “John Locke,” xxiiin12 Collier, Jeremy, 100–101; “A Moral Essay Concerning Cloaths,” 75.27– 28 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, xvi, xcvi–xcvii “A Congratulatory Poem on his Sacred Majesty James the Second’s Succession to the Crown,” 52–53.7–14 Connell, P. J., Secular Chains, xlixn46, xciin106 Cooke, John, Thirty Nine Sermons, 94.310 Cotton, Charles, 102 Creech, Thomas, xlv, 8.23–24, 10.45–46, 17.147, 24–25.268, 40.123–44, 48– 49.275–82, 102 Cromwell, Henry, xxix, 102, 104 Cromwell, Oliver, 93.284 Crousaz, Jean-Pierre de, lxxviiin87, cxi; Commentaire/A Commentary, xcii, xciii; Examen/An Examination, lxin56, lxxivn85, xcii, xciii–xciv; and fatalism, xvi; and Spinozism, xciii

Index Cudworth, Ralph, True Intellectual System, xxxix, 53.13–14, 101 Curtius, M., 43–44.198–200 Dacier, Anne, xxix Damrosch, Leopold, Jr., The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope, xxvn14 Day, Robert, Free Thoughts, 52.9 Decius, Gaius Messius Quintus Traianus, 43–44.198–200 Delany, Patrick, 100 Democritus, lxxiii, 24.268, 62.172 Derham, William, Physico-Theology, 62.170 Desaguliers, John Theophilus, The Newtonian System of the World, 32.35 Digby, Edward, 82.104–5 Digby, Robert, 82.104–5 Digby, William, 82.104–5 Donne, John, 101; “The First Anniversary,” 61.152; “The Second Anniversary,” 61.152; “To Sir Henry Wotton,” 45.221–26; “To the Countess of Salisbury. August. 1614.,” xxiii Dorset, Charles, 100 Dryden, John, xxxi, 11–12.75–76, 31.25, 101; Absalom and Achitophel, 43.199, 74.7; “Baucis and Philemon,” 84.135; The Hind and the Panther, 45.217–18, 66.227–28; “Juvenal: Satyr VI,” 51.3– 4; “Juvenal: Satyr X,” 40.144, 79.67– 72; “Of the Pythagorean Philosophy,” 62.162; “Palamon and Arcite,” 52–53.7–14; “Persius: Satyr I,” 75.24; Religio Laici, 6.6, 10.60, 75.23–26; “The Wife of Bath her Tale,” 72.317 Dudgeon, William: The State of the Moral World Considered, lxxviiin87; A View of the Necessitarian or Best Scheme, lxxviiin87 Du Resnel du Bellay, Jean-François, xc, xcii, xciii, civ Empedocles, xxxviii, xli, 83.123–4, 101 Epictetus, 10.51, 101

125

Epicurus, xviii, xlv, 100 Erasmus, Desiderius, lxix, 47.262, 66.225–26, 68–69.282, 101 Erskine-Hill, Howard, “Pope on the Origins of Society,” lxxiiin84 Eugène, of Savoy, 90.244 Eustathius, xxix Evelyn, John, An Essay, 8.23–24 Falkland, Lucius Cary, Viscount, 81– 82.99 Felton, Henry, The Christian Faith Asserted, 53.13–14 Fénelon, François de, xxx, lxi; Telemachus, 67.241–44, 69.289–96, 101 Filmer, Sir Robert, lxxvi Foot, Michael, xvi–xvi Force, James E., “Holy Grail, (Almost) Wholly Newton,” lixn54 Fortescue, William, xlix, 83.126 Foxon, D. F., 32.36 Frank, Mark, LI Sermons, 92.269–80 Fuller, Thomas, Gnomologia, 29.17 Galilei, Galileo, 9.42 Gay, John, 101; “The Hare and Many Friends,” 31.25 George I, xix George II, xix Gibbs, James, 58.104 Gildon, Charles, 101; The Deist’s Manual, 61.131–50; A New Rehearsal, 52.9 Goldgar, Bertrand A., “Pope’s Theory of the Passions,” lxvn66 Gosling, Robert, The Laws of Honour, 87.207 Gould, Robert: “The Mourning Swain,” 65.217; “The Play-House,” 92.269–80 Guardian, The, 23.233–41 Halley, Edmond, 32.35 Hammond, Brean S., Pope and Bolingbroke, lxxxviiin99 Harris, James A., xviiin2

126

Index

Harte, Walter, xliii; Essay on Reason, xcv Hay, Robert (“Colonel”), xlvii Helen of Troy, 43.194 Herodotus, xxix Hesiod, xxix, 42.182 Hirschman, Albert O., The Passions and the Interests, lxvin69 Hobbes, Thomas, 39.131; and equality, lxxix; Leviathan, lxxix, 102; prose of, xxix; and social contract, 68.272; on sovereignty, lxxvi Homer, xv, xxix, xxxviii–xxxixn34, 102, 103; Iliad, 16.142, 61.158, 101; Odyssey, 61.158, 74.9, 99 Horace, xlvii, 83.123–4, 102; Epistles, 24.252; Odes, 12.78; Satire II.ii, 51– 52.3–4; Satires, 47.262 Hostler, John, Leibniz’s Moral Philosophy, lxin56 Hudson, Nicholas, “‘Oral Tradition,’“ 66.227–28 Hudson, Wayne, Enlightenment and Modernity, lxxxii–lxxxiiin95, lxxxviiin100 Huet, Pierre Daniel, 102; Essay on the Weakness of Human Understanding, lv, lxiiin60 Hughes, John, 100 Hume, David, xvi, xxii, lxxxviii, xcvi; Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, xcvii–xcviii; Treatise of Human Nature, lv–lvi Hunton, Philip, A Treatise of Monarchy, 69.294 Hutcheson, Francis, lxix; and benevolence, lxxviii; Essay, lxvii, 38.120, 48–49.275–82; Inquiry, 42.175–76; philosophical essayism and inquiry of, xxii; and social affection, lxxii Hutchinson, Lucy, Order and Disorder, 21.205, 44.205–10 Jaki, Stanley L., cv James I and VI, 92–93.281–82

James II, 52–53.7–14 Johnson, Samuel, xxxiv–xxxvi; A Commentary, xciii, xciv; “Pope,” xcii, xciv–xcv Jones, Tom: Pope and Berkeley, lvin; “Pope and the Ends of History,” lxxvin; “Pope and Translations of Plutarch’s Moralia,” 103 Jonson, Ben, xxix Juvenal, xci, 40.144 Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Judgement, cvi–cvii; Universal Natural History, xvi, civ–cviii Ken, Thomas, “Hymnotheo,” 95– 96.345–46 Kennet, Basil, lxiii; Romæ Antiquæ Notitia, 31.25 King, William, De origine mali, cii Laelius, Gaius, 6.1 Lawrence, John, Christian Morals, 60– 61.146 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, xciii, ci– cii, 9.43–44, 10.43–48, 12.78, 22.234, 23.241–43, 24–25.268, 26.289–92, 32.34, 76.49–50; and knowledge, lxiii; and Montaigne, lxvii; Rousseau on, ciii; and suffering, xxxviii; Theodicy, lix, lix–lxi; and Voltaire, cii Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim von, xxvi, lix, ci, cii L’Estrange, Roger, Seneca’s Morals Abstracted, 29.17 Lipsius, Justus, 72.318, 81.83–98, 102 Livy, 16.142 Locke, John, 10.60, 20.193–96, 47.262, 56–57.77, 102; and Bolingbroke, lxxxviii; on changing understanding, xxiiin12; on knowledge, lvi–lvii; and Leibniz, lx; philosophical essayism and inquiry of, xxii; prose of, xxix; and prosody, xxiv; and social contract, 68.272; on sovereignty, lxxvi

Index Lovejoy, A. O., civ Lucan, 102; Pharsalia, 16.142 Lucretia, 43.194, 87–88.207–8 Lucretius, 8.23–24, 10.45–46, 11–12.75– 76, 20–21.198, 40.123–44, 100, 102; birth and destruction in, xli; and language, xviii; life stages in, lxix; On the Nature of Things, xv, xlv–xlvi, 6.1; rise of things in, xlv–xlvi Macdonald family, 47.262 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 70–71.303–4 Mack, Maynard, xxxi, cxvii, cxviii, 17.147; Alexander Pope, xciin106; on Bolingbroke, lxxxvii; and Kant, civ; and Rochefoucauld, lxvi Malebranche, Nicolas, xxx, 102; Search after Truth, lv, 40.138, 48.269–70, 49–50.292; A Treatise of Morality, 60.140, 62.170 Mallet, David, xcv Manilius, 14.102, 19.180, 42.182, 102; “Preface,” 24–25.268 Marcellus, Marcus Claudius, 91.257 Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of, 90.244 Martial, 102; Ep.10.47, 80.77–82 Martin, David, A Discourse of Natural Religion, lxn55 McColley, Grant, “Locke’s Essay,” lvii– lviiin52 McLaverty, James, xliii, 17.147, 37.99 Memmius, Gaius, 6.1 Mendelssohn, Moses, xxvi, lix, ci, cii Milton, John, 101, 102; Paradise Lost, xv, 8.16–17, 68.266, 93.284; Samson Agonistes, 56.68 Moivre, Abraham de, 58.104 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 31– 32.27–28, 100 Montaigne, Michel de, lxxiii, 11–12.75– 76, 12.78, 13–14.97–98, 100, 102; “An Apology for Raimond de Sebonde,” lxvi–lxvii, 10.60, 13–14.97–98, 19– 20.190, 19.173–88, 28–29.1–2, 37–

127

38.108, 55.27–46, 62.172; inquisitive essays of, xxii; and knowledge, lxiii; “Of Experience,” 19–20.190; “Of Moderation,” 19.190; “Of the Affection of Fathers to their Children,” 48.269–70; “Of the Inconstancy of our Actions,” lxviiin74, 40.138; and passions vs. reason, lxvi–lxvii; “That to Study Philosophy, is to Learn to Die,” 39.126; “That we Laugh and Cry for the Same Thing,” lxviii, 40.138 More, Henry, The Immortality of the Soul, 78.62 Morris, David B.: Alexander Pope, xxviin20; “Pope and the Arts of Pleasure,” xxxiiin26 Morris, Robert, An Enquiry After Virtue, 72.305 Moss, Robert, The Providential Division, 77.49–52 Needler, Henry, The Works of Henry Needler, 94.310 Nemesius, bishop of Emesa, The Nature of Man, 65.217 Nero, 43–44.198–200 Newton, Sir Isaac, cv, 30.19–20, 32.34, 32–33.35–38; Principia, 24– 25.268 Nichol, Donald W., Pope’s Literary Legacy, xciin106 Nicole, Pierre, xxx, lxvi; Moral Essays, 103 Noggle, James, The Skeptical Sublime, civn126 Norfolk, John Howard, Duke of, 88.205–16 Norris, John, A Letter to Mr. Dodwell, 80–81.89 Norton, Frances, Lady, The Applause of Virtue, 79.69–70 Nottingham, earls of, 88.205–16 Nuttall, A. D., Pope’s Essay on Man, xxin7, xxxiiin26, lxvn66

128

Index

Oldham, John, 103; “To the Memory,” 37.101–2 Oppian, 103; Halieuticks, 63.177, 84.135 Osborn, James M., lxvn67, lxxxviii Ovid, xxix; Metamorphoses, xli, 55.56 Owen, John, A Continuation, 52–53.7–14 Oxford, Edward Harley, Earl of, 99, 104

Price, J. V.: “Pope and the Scottish Enlightenment Universities,” xcviii Prior, Matthew, 103; Carmen Sæculare, 31.23; “Opinion,” 39.132; Solomon, 55.27–46, 57–58.89–98; “To Dr. Sherlock,” 91–92.265 Protagoras, 28–29.1–2 Pythagoras, xli

Paget, Thomas Catesby, Some Reflections, 70–71.303–4 Parker, Fred, Scepticism and Literature, xxn4 Pascal, Blaise, xxix–xxx, lxi, 24.259–60, 32–33.35–38, 77.49–52, 101; and Jansenists, lxvi; Pensées, lxiii–lxiv, lxxx, 56–57.77, 103; perspectivalism of, lxiii–lxiv; and social distinction, lxxx; and Voltaire, xc–xcii Peleus, 43.194 Penn, William, No Cross, No Crown, 87.203 Pickles, Eric, xvii Place, Conyers, An Essay, 53.13–14 Plato, xviii, xxix, 31.23, 89.236 Pliny, xxix Plotinus, 11.69–70, 27.294, 76.49–50, 85.152; and Boethius, xliii; and Empedocles, xxxviii; and goods of this world, lxxxiii; and love, xxxiv; and providence, xx–xxi, xxxiv, xlii; and rightness of world, xxvi; and Shaftesbury, lxxxv; and Taylor, xxxix Plutarch, xxii, xxix, 24.268, 103; Lives, 87.203; Morals, 65.217; “Of Eating Flesh II,” 57–58.89–98; “Of Morall Vertue,” lxvii–lxviii, 35.59–62, 37– 38.108; “That Brute Beasts Have Use of Reason,” lxx–lxxi, 57–58.89– 98 Polybius, 103; Histories, lxxiv–lxxvi, 66.227–28 Pope, Edith, 82.109–10 Powell, J.G.F., 6.1

Quinsey, Katherine M., “Dualities of the Divine,” xliiin38, 96–97.363–72 Racine, Louis, lix, lxi, 101 Richardson, Jonathan, Jr., xxxvi–xxxvii Richardson, Jonathan, Sr., xxxvi, xlix Richetti, John J., Philosophical Writing, xxiin8 Robinson, John, Thou Who Art, lxxxvin97 La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de, lxv–lxvi, 46.230, 103 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, lxix, 103; “Against Reason and Mankind,” 8.23–24, 46.232, 48–49.275–82, 62.164; “Artemiza to Chloe,” 49.290, 96.347–48 Roscommon, Wentworth Dillon, Earl of, 103; An Essay on Translated Verse, 40.138 Ross, Dukedom/Earldom of, 47.262 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, xvi, xxvi, cii– civ; Confessions, civ Rowe, Nicholas, 102 Sandys, George, A Paraphrase upon the Psalms of David, 80.89 Savile, George, Marquis of Halifax, 37.97–100, 103–4; The Character of a Trimmer, 44.205–10; “Miscellanys,” 44.205–10 Scipio, P. Cornelius Africanus, 6.1 Scott, John, The Christian Life, 56–57.77, 68.266, 78.62 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 104; Conversations upon Several Subjects, 40.138

Index Seneca, xlix, 13–14.97–98, 81.83–98, 89.233–36, 104; “De vita beata,” 94.310; on evil, xxn5; inquisitive essays of, xxii; “Of Firmness,” 48– 49.275–82; on providence, lxxxi; and stages of life, lxix; on suffering, xxxviii Sextus (son of Tarquinius Superbus), 87–88.207–8 Shadwell, Thomas, The Virtuoso, 30.19– 20 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of, xxvi, 104; Characteristics, cii; An Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit, lxxi–lxxii, 60.146, 72.305; The Moralists, lxxxiv–lxxxvi, c–ci, cii; philosophical essayism and inquiry of, xxii Shakespeare, William, xv, 101 Sherburn, George, “Letters of Alexander Pope,” 103 Sherlock, William, Sermons, 83.121–22 Shklar, Judith, xvii, xli Sidney, Algernon, 104; Discourses Concerning Government, 69.294 Sidney, Sir Philip, 82.101 Simplicius, xxxviii–xxxixn34 Singer, Elizabeth, “On the Creation,” 18.169 Sitter, John, xxvii Smalridge, George, 39.131–32 Smith, Adam, xvi, ci; Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, xcviii–xcix; Theory of Moral Sentiments, xcix, c Smith, Courtney Weiss, Empiricist Devotions, xxxiin23, xlvin43, lixn54 Smith, Craig, Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy, xcviii–xcixn117 Socrates, xxxviii, lxxxvi, 31.23, 89.236 Solomon, Harry M.: The Rape of the Text, xxiin9, xxviin20, lvi–lviin51; Reading Philosophical Poetry, xxvn14 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, “Acts of Love and Knowledge,” xxxiin24

129

Spence, Joseph, xxii–xxiii, xlvii–xlviii, xlix–l, li, lv, lxv, lxvi, lxxxvii Spenser, Edmund, 101 Spinoza, Baruch, lix, xcii, xciii, 53.13–14 Srigley, Michael, The Mighty Maze, xlin37, cxin136 Stephens, John Calhoun, 23.233–41 Stoics, xx, lxxviii, lxxxi, xcix–c, 24.268, 37.101–2, 39.131, 52.9, 94.310 Stuart, James, 92–93.281–82 Stubbe, Henry, A Specimen, 30.19–20 Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, 85.146, 104 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, 88.205– 16 Swift, Jonathan, xlvii, xlviii, li–lii, lxxxvin97, lxxxviii, 83.126, 100, 101, 102; A Modest Proposal, xliii Takeda, Juno Thérèse, Between Crown and Commerce, 82.107–8 Tarquinius Collatinus, Lucius, 87– 88.207–8 Tasso, Torquato: Aminta, 104; Godfrey of Bulloigne, 79.69–70 Tassoni, Alessandro, xxix; La Secchia Rapita, 90.237–46, 104 Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self, xxxin22, xxxix, xl, cxi Taylor, Jeremy: Antiquitates christianæ, 56–57.77; Holy Living and Holy Dying, 104; XXV Sermons, “Of Lukewarmnesse and Zeal,” 60.129 Temple, William, xxix, lxxvi, lxxvii, 104; “An Essay on the Original and Nature of Government,” lxxiii, 70.303–4; “An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning,” 15– 16.123–24, 33–34.1–52; “Heads,” 79.67–72 Thales, 24.268, 28–29.1–2 Theobald, John, “A Funeral Poem,” 31.23 Theobald, Lewis, xciin106 Theophrastus, 19–20.190

130

Index

Thomson, James, lxxxiv, 104; Autumn, 54.37–38; Spring, 61.152, 62.162; Summer, 9.21–32, 23.233–41, 95.332; Winter, 61.152 Tickell, Thomas, 104–5; A Poem, 91– 92.265 Tillotson, John, xxix, 105; Sermons, lxixn76, 30.19–20 Toland, John, 24.268, 47.262, 105; Clito, 8.23–24, 14–15.108, 24–25.268 Tonson, Jacob, Sr., 99 Trumbull, Sir William, xxix, 102 Turenne, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, vicomte de, 82.100 Tyrrell, James, A Brief Disquisition, 76.35–38 Vespasianus, Titus Flavius, 43–44.198– 200, 85.146 Virgil, xxix; Aeneid, 78.62; Georgics, 31.25 Voltaire, lxxvi, cii–ciii, 7.8, 7.15–16, 9.32, 9.37, 9.42, 10.43–48, 10.58, 11.69–70, 12.79, 13.91, 15.111, 15.115, 18.161, 21.206, 23.241–46, 32–33.35–38, 37.101–2, 39.131–32; annotations of, cxviii; and Bolingbroke, xc–xcii; Candide, civ; on EM as beautiful didactic poem, xvi; The League, 105; and Leibniz, cii; letter to PierreRobert Le Cornier de Cideville, xc; Lettres philosophiques, “Sur les Pensées de M. Pascal,” lxxxvii, xc– xcii; and rightness of world, xxvi Walpole, Robert, xix, xlix, 6.1, 58.104 Walsh, William, xxix Warburton, William, xxix, cxvii, cxviii, 44.203–4; A Critical and Philosophical

Commentary on Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man, lxxxvii, xcii, xciii, xcv; defense by, xvi; and Dudgeon, lxxviiin87; letter to, lix; on Pope’s poetry and philosophy, xxiv–xxv; A Vindication of Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man, lxxxvii, xcii Warton, Joseph, lix; An Essay, xxviin20 Watson, Thomas, A Body of Practical Divinity, 78–79.66 Watts, Isaac, lv Wharton, Philip James Wharton, Duke of, 92–93.281–82 Whichcote, Benjamin, Select Sermons, 39.131 White, Douglas H., Pope and the Context of Controversy, lxxviiin88 Wilson, Catherine, Leibniz’s Metaphysics, lxn55 Winchilsea, Anne Finch, Countess of, 101; The Spleen, 21.199–200 Winstanley, William, The Essex Champion, 92.268 Wishart, William, The Certain, 80– 81.89 Wollaston, William, 64–65.199–206, 81.83–98, 105; Religion of Nature Delineated, lxxxii Wren, Christopher, 58.104 Wycherley, William, xxix, 105; “A Collection of Maxims and Moral Reflections,” 42.123–74; “For Solitude and Retirement against the Public, Active Life,” 62.164; “Miscellaneous Essays, 88.205–16; Miscellany Poems, 79.67–72 Young, Edward, Imperium Pelagi, 29.17, 105