The ancient pagan gods are here very exactly described. This fact evinceth the truth of that original, which the poet gives to superstition; for if these phantasms were first raised in the imagination of tyrants, they must needs have the qualities here assigned to them. For force being the tyrant's virtue, and luxury his happiness, the attributes of his god would of course be revenge and lust; in a word, the antitype of himself. But there was another, and more substantial cause, of the resemblance between a tyrant and a pagan god; and that was the making gods of conquerors, as the poet says, and so canonizing a tyrant's vices with his person. That these gods should suit a people humbled to the stroke of a master will be no wonder, if we recollect a generous saying of the ancients,—"that day which sees a man a slave takes away half his virtue."

Ver. 262. and heav'n on pride.] This might be very well said of those times when no one was content to go to heaven without being received there on the footing of a god, with a ceremony of an Αποθεωσις.

Ver. 283. 'Twas then, the studious head, &c.] The poet seemeth here to mean the polite and nourishing age of Greece; and those benefactors to mankind, which he had principally in view, were Socrates and Aristotle; who, of all the pagan world, spoke best of God, and wrote best of government.

Ver. 295. Such is the world's great harmony, &c.] A harmony very different from the pre-established harmony of the celebrated Leibnitz, which introduceth a fatality destructive of all religion and morality. Yet hath the learned M. de Crousaz ventured to accuse our poet of espousing that dangerous whimsy. The pre-established harmony was built upon, and is an outrageous extension of a conception of Plato, who, combating the atheistical objections about the origin of evil, employs this argument in defence of Providence: "That amongst an infinite number of possible worlds in God's idea, this which he hath created and brought into being, and which admits of a mixture of evil, is the best. But if the best, then evil consequently is partial, comparatively small, and tendeth to the greater perfection of the whole." This principle is espoused and supported by Mr. Pope with all the power of reason and poetry. But neither was Plato a fatalist, nor is there any fatalism in the argument. As to the truth of the notion, that is another question; and how far it cleareth up the very difficult controversy about the origin of evil, is still another. That it is a full solution of the difficulty, I cannot think, for reasons too long to be given in this place. Perhaps we shall never have a full solution here, and it may be no great matter though we have not, as we are demonstrably certain of the moral attributes of the Deity. Yet this will never hinder writers from exposing themselves on this subject. A late author[1597] thinks he can account for the origin of evil, and therefore he will write: he thinks too, that the clearing up this difficulty is necessary to secure the foundation of religion, and therefore he will print. But he is doubly mistaken: he must know little of philosophy to fancy that he has found the solution; and still less of religion, to imagine that the want of his solution can affect our belief in God. Such writers

However, Mr. Pope may be justified in receiving and enforcing this Platonic notion, as it hath been adopted by the most celebrated and orthodox divines both of the ancient and modern church. This doctrine was taken up by Leibnitz; but it was to ingraft upon it a most pernicious fatalism. Plato said, God chose the best: Leibnitz said, he could not but choose the best, as he could not act without, what this philosopher called, a sufficient reason. Plato supposed freedom in God to choose one of two things equally good: Leibnitz held the supposition to be absurd: but, however, admitting the case, he still held that God could not choose one of two things equally good. Thus it appears, the first went on the system of freedom; and that the latter, notwithstanding the most artful disguises of his principles, in his Theodicée, was a thorough fatalist: for we cannot well suppose he would give that freedom to man which he had taken away from God. The truth of the matter seems to be this: he saw, on the one hand, the monstrous absurdity of supposing, with Spinoza, that blind fate was the author of a coherent universe; but yet, on the other, he could not conceive with Plato, how God could foresee and conduct, according to an archetypal idea, a world, of all possible worlds the best, inhabited by free agents. This difficulty, therefore, which made the socinians take prescience from God, disposed Leibnitz to take free-will from man: and thus he fashioned his fantastical hypothesis; he supposed that when God made the body, he impressed on his new-created machine a certain series or suite of motions; and that when he made the fellow soul, he impressed a correspondent series of ideas; whose operations, throughout the whole duration of the union, were so exactly timed, that whenever an idea was excited, a correspondent motion was ever ready to satisfy the volition. Thus, for instance, when the mind had the will to raise the arm to the head, the body was so pre-contrived, as to raise, at that very moment, the part required. This he called the pre-established harmony; and with this he promised to do wonders. "Yet after all," says an excellent philosopher and best interpreter of Newton, "he owned to his friends, that this extraordinary notion was only a lusus ingenii (un jeu d'esprit) to try his parts, and laugh at the credulity of philosophers; who are as fond of a new paradox, as enthusiasts of a new light. If at other times he was so pleased with his own notions in his Theodicée, as to defend them seriously against the learned Dr. Clarke, that shows only that he angled for two different sorts of reputation, from the same performance; and unluckily he lost both. The subject was too serious to pass for a romance; and the principles too absurd to be admitted for truth." Mr. Baxter's Appendix to the Inquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul, p. 162. As this was the case, none would have thought it amiss in M. Voltaire to oppose one romance to another, had he rested there. But his tale of Candide, which professes to ridicule the optimism of Leibnitz, was apparently composed in favour of an irreligious naturalism, which he makes the solution of all the difficulties in the story.

Ver. 303. For forms of government, &c.] Such as Harrington, Wildman, Neville,[1598] &c. about the several forms of a legitimate policy. These fine lines have been strangely misunderstood. The author, against his own express words, against the plain sense of his system, hath been conceived to mean, that all governments and all religions were, as to their forms and objects, indifferent. But as this wrong judgment proceeded from ignorance of the reason of the reproof, as explained above,[1599] that explanation is alone sufficient to rectify the mistake. However, not to leave him under the least suspicion in a matter of so much importance, I shall justify the sense here given to this passage, more at large:

I. And first, as to society: Let us consider the words themselves; and then compare this mistaken sense with the context. The poet, we may observe, is here speaking, not of civil society at large, but of a just legitimate policy:

Now mixed states are of various kinds; in some of which the democratic, in others the aristocratic, and in others the monarchic form prevails. Now, as each of these mixed forms is equally legitimate, as being founded on the principles of natural liberty, that man is guilty of the highest folly, who chooseth rather to employ himself in a speculative contest for the superior excellence of one of these forms to the rest, than in promoting the good administration of that settled form to which he is subject. And yet most of our warm disputes about government have been of this kind. Again, if by forms of government must needs be meant legitimate government, because that is the subject under debate, then by modes of faith, which is the correspondent idea, must needs be meant the modes or explanations of the true faith, because the author is here too on the subject of true religion:

Besides, the very expression (than which nothing can be more precise) confineth us to understand by modes of faith, those human explanations of christian mysteries, in contending about which zeal and ignorance have so perpetually violated charity. Secondly, If we consider the context; to suppose him to mean, that all forms of government are indifferent, is making him directly contradict the preceding paragraph, where he extols the patriot for discriminating the true from the false modes of government. He, says the poet,

Here he recommendeth the true form of government, which is the mixed. In another place he as strongly condemneth the false, or the absolute jure divino form:

But the reader will not be displeased to see the poet's own apology, as I find it written in the year 1740, in his own hand, in the margin of a pamphlet, where he found these two celebrated lines very much misapplied: "The author of these lines was far from meaning that no one form of government is, in itself, better than another, (as, that mixed or limited monarchy, for example, is not preferable to absolute), but that no form of government, however excellent or preferable, in itself, can be sufficient to make a people happy, unless it be administered with integrity. On the contrary, the best sort of government, when the form of it is preserved, and the administration corrupt, is most dangerous."

II. Again, to suppose the poet to mean, that all religions are indifferent, is an equally wrong, as well as uncharitable suspicion. Mr. Pope, though his subject, in this Essay on Man, confineth him to natural religion, his purpose being to vindicate God's natural dispensations to mankind against the atheist, yet he giveth frequent intimations of a more sublime dispensation, and even of the necessity of it, particularly in his second Epistle, ver. 149, &c., where he confesseth the weakness and insufficiency of human reason. And likewise in his fourth Epistle, where, speaking of the good man, the favourite of heaven, he saith,

But natural religion never lengthened hope on to faith; nor did any religion, but the christian, ever conceive that faith could fill the mind with happiness. Lastly, In this very Epistle, and in this very place, speaking of the great restorers of the religion of nature, he intimates that they could only draw God's shadow, not his image:

as reverencing that truth, which telleth us, this discovery was reserved for the "glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God." 2 Cor. iv. 4.

Ver. 305. For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;] These latter ages have seen so many scandalous contentions for modes of faith, to the violation of Christian charity, and dishonour of sacred Scripture, that it is not at all strange they should become the object of so benevolent and wise an author's resentment. But that which he here seemed to have more particularly in his eye, was the long and mischievous squabble between Waterland and Jackson,[1600] on a point confessedly above reason, and amongst those adorable mysteries, which it is the honour of our religion to find unfathomable. In this, by the weight of answers and replies, redoubled upon one another without mercy, they made so profound a progress, that the one proved, nothing hindered in nature, but that the Son might have been the Father; and the other, that nothing hindered in grace, but that the Son may be a mere creature. But if, instead of throwing so many Greek Fathers at one another's heads, they had but chanced to reflect on the sense of one Greek word, απειρια, that it signifies both infinity and ignorance, this single equivocation might have saved them ten thousand, which they expended in carrying on the controversy. However, those mists that magnified the scene enlarged the character of the combatants, and nobody expecting common sense on a subject where we have no ideas, the defects of dulness disappeared, and its advantages (for, advantages it has) were all provided for. The worst is, such kind of writers seldom know when to have done. For writing themselves up into the same delusion with their readers, they are apt to venture out into the more open paths of literature, where their reputation, made out of that stuff which Lucian calls σκοτος ὁλοχροος, presently falls from them, and their nakedness appears. And thus it fared with our two worthies. The world, which must have always something to amuse it, was now, and it was time, grown weary of its playthings; and catched at a new object, that promised them more agreeable entertainment. Tindal, a kind of bastard Socrates, had brought our speculations from heaven to earth, and, under the pretence of advancing the antiquity of christianity, laboured to undermine its original. This was a controversy that required another management. Clear sense, severe reasoning, a thorough knowledge of prophane and sacred antiquity, and an intimate acquaintance with human nature, were the qualities proper for such as engaged in this subject. A very unpromising adventure for these metaphysical nurslings, bred up under the shade of chimeras. Yet they would needs venture out.[1601] What they got by it was only to be once well laughed at, and then, forgotten.

But one odd circumstance deserves to be remembered; though they wrote not, we may be sure, in concert, yet each attacked his adversary at the same time; fastened upon him in the same place; and mumbled him with just the same toothless rage. But the ill success of this escape soon brought them to themselves. The one made a fruitless effort to revive the old game, in a discourse on The Importance of the Doctrine of the Trinity; and the other has been ever since rambling in Space and Time.[1602] This short history, as insignificant as the subjects of it are, may not be altogether unuseful to posterity. Divines may learn by these examples to avoid the mischiefs done to religion and literature, through the affectation of being wise above what is written, and knowing beyond what can be understood.

Ver. 318. And bade self-love and social be the same.] True self-love is an appetite for that proper good, for the enjoyment of which we were made as we are. Now that good is commensurate with all other good, and a part and portion of universal good: it is, therefore, the same with social, which hath these properties.

NOTES ON EPISTLE IV.

Ver. 6. O'erlooked, seen double, &c.] O'erlooked by those who place happiness in any thing exclusive of virtue; seen double by those who admit any thing else to have a share with virtue in procuring happiness, these being the two general mistakes which this Epistle is employed to confute.

1. Those who place happiness, or the summum bonum, in pleasure, Ἡδονη; such as the Cyrenaic sect, called, on that account, the Hedonic. 2. Those who place it in a certain tranquillity or calmness of mind, which they call Ευθυμια; such as the Democritic sect. 3. The Epicurean. 4. The Stoic. 5. The Protagorean, which held that Man was παντων χρηματων μετρον, the measure of all things; for that all things which appear to him, are, and those things which appear not to any man, are not; so that every imagination or opinion of every man was true. 6. The Sceptic; whose absolute doubt is, with great judgment, said to be the effect of indolence, as well as the absolute trust of the Protagorean. For the same dread of labour attending the search of truth, which makes the Protagorean presume it is always at hand, makes the Sceptic conclude it is never to be found. The only difference is, that the laziness of the one is desponding, and the laziness of the other sanguine; yet both can give it a good name, and call it happiness.

Ver. 23. Some sunk to beasts, &c.] These four lines added in the last edition, as necessary to complete the summary of the false pursuits after happiness among the Greek philosophers.

I reckon it for nothing that M. du Resnel saw none of the fine reasoning from these two lines to ver. 73, in which the poet confutes both the philosophic and popular errors concerning happiness. What I can least bear is his perverting these two lines to a horrid and senseless fatalism, foreign to the argument in hand, and directly contrary to the poet's general principles:

i.e. a general law always determines the first cause: which is the very Fate of the ancient pagans; who supposed that the destinies gave law to the father of gods and men. The poet says again, soon after, ver. 49, "Order is heaven's first law," i. e. the first law made by God relates to order, which is a beautiful allusion to the Scripture history of the creation, when God first appeased the disorders of chaos, and separated the light from the darkness. Let us now hear his translator:

Order, that inflexible and grand legislator, who is the first author of the law of heaven. A proposition abominable in most senses; absurd in all.

Ver. 79. Reason's whole pleasure, &c.] This is a beautiful periphrasis for happiness; for all we feel of good is by sensation and reflection. But the translator, who seemed little to concern himself with the poet's philosophy or argument, mistook this description of happiness for a description of the intellectual and sensitive faculties, opposed to one another, and therefore turns it thus,

And so, with the highest absurdity, not only makes the poet constitute sensual excesses a part of human happiness, but likewise the product of virtue.

Ver. 82. And peace, &c.] Conscious innocence, says the poet, is the only source of internal peace; and known innocence, of external; therefore, peace is the sole issue of virtue, or, in his own emphatic words, peace is all thy own; a conclusive observation in his argument; which stands thus: Is happiness rightly placed in externals? No; for it consists in health, peace, and competence; health and competence are the product of temperance; and peace, of perfect innocence.

Ver. 100. See god-like Turenne] This epithet has a peculiar justness, the great man to whom it is applied not being distinguished from other generals, for any of his superior qualities, so much as for his providential care of those whom he led to war, in which he was so intent, that his chief purpose in taking on himself the command of armies, seems to have been the preservation of mankind. In this god-like care he was more remarkably employed throughout the whole course of that famous campaign in which he lost his life.

Ver. 110. Lent heav'n a parent, &c.] This last instance of the poet's illustration of the ways of Providence, the reader sees has a peculiar elegance, where a tribute of piety to a parent is paid in return of thanks to, and made subservient of his vindication of, the great Giver and Father of all things. The mother of the author, a person of great piety and charity, died the year this poem was finished, viz. 1733.

Ver. 121. Think we, like some weak prince, &c.] Agreeable hereunto, Holy Scripture, in its account of things under the common Providence of heaven, never represents miracles as wrought for the sake of him who is the object of them, but in order to give credit to some of God's extraordinary dispensations to mankind.

Ver. 123. Shall burning Etna, &c.] Alluding to the fate of those two great naturalists, Empedocles and Pliny, who both perished by too near an approach to Etna and Vesuvius, while they were exploring the cause of their eruptions.

Ver. 142. After ver. 142 in some editions:

The joke, though lively, was ill placed, and therefore struck out of the text.

Ver. 177. Go, like the Indian, &c.] Alluding to the example of the Indian, in Epist. i. ver. 99, which shows, that that example was not given to discredit any rational hopes of future happiness, but only to reprove the folly of separating them from charity, as when

Ver. 219. Heroes are much the same, &c.] This character might have been drawn with greater force; and deserved the poet's care. But Milton supplies what is here wanting.

Ver. 222. an enemy of all mankind!] Had all nations, with regard to their heroes, been of the humour with the Normans, who called Robert II., the greatest of their Dukes, by the name of Robert the Devil, the races of heroes might have been less numerous, or, however, less mischievous.

Ver. 267. Painful pre-eminence, &c.] This, to his friend, nor does it at all contradict what he had said to him concerning happiness, in the beginning of the Epistle:

For there he compliments his virtue; here he estimates the value of his politics, which he calls wisdom. He is now proving that nothing either external to man, or what is not in man's power, and of his own acquirement, can make him happy here. The most plausible rival of virtue is human wisdom: yet even this is so far from giving any degree of real happiness, that it deprives us of those common comforts of life, which are a kind of support, under the want of happiness. Such as the more innocent of those delusions which he speaks of in the second Epistle,

Now knowledge destroyeth all those comforts, by setting man above life's weaknesses; so that in him, who thinketh to attain happiness by knowledge alone, independent of virtue, the fable is reversed, and in a preposterous attempt to gain the substance, he loseth even the shadow. This I take to be the sense of this fine stroke of satire on the wrong pursuits after happiness.

These two instances are chosen with great judgment. The world, perhaps, doth not afford two such other. Bacon discovered and laid down those true principles of science, by whose assistance Newton was enabled to unfold the whole law of nature. He was no less eminent for the creative power of his imagination, the brightness of his conceptions, and the force of his expression; yet being convicted on his own confession for bribery and corruption in the administration of justice, while he presided in the supreme court of equity, he endeavoured to repair his ruined fortunes by the most profligate flattery to the court, which, indeed, from his very first entrance into it, he had accustomed himself to practise with a prostitution that disgraceth the very profession of letters or of science.

Cromwell seemeth to be distinguished in the most eminent manner, with regard to his abilities, from all other great and wicked men, who have overturned the liberties of their country. The times in which others have succeeded in this attempt, were such as saw the spirit of liberty suppressed and stifled by a general luxury and venality; but Cromwell subdued his country, when this spirit was at its height, by a successful struggle against court-oppression; and while it was conducted and supported by a set of the greatest geniuses for government the world ever saw embarked together in one common cause.

Ver. 283. Or ravished with the whistling of a name,] And even this fantastic glory sometimes sutlers a terrible reverse. Sacheverel, in his Voyage to Icolm-kill, describing the church there, tells us, that "in one corner is a peculiar enclosure, in which were the monuments of the kings of many different nations, as Scotland, Ireland, Norway, and the Isle of Man. This (said the person who showed me the place, pointing to a plain stone) was the monument of the great Teague, king of Ireland. I had never heard of him, and could not but reflect of how little value is greatness, that has barely left a name scandalous to a nation, and a grave which the meanest of mankind would never envy."

M. du Resnel translates the line thus:

i.e. Learn then, that there is no happiness here below, unless virtue regulates the heart and the understanding, which destroys all the force of his author's conclusion. He had proved, that happiness consists neither in external goods, as the vulgar imagined, nor yet in the visions of the philosophers: he concludes, therefore, that it consists in virtue alone. His translator says, that without virtue, there can be no happiness. And so say the men whom his author is here confuting. For though they supposed external goods requisite to happiness, it was when in conjunction with virtue. Mr. Pope says,

And so ought a faithful translator to have said after him.

Ver. 316. After ver. 316, in the MS.

These lines are extremely finished. In which there is such a soothing sweetness in the melancholy harmony of the versification, as if the poet was then in that tender office in which he was most officious, and in which all his soul came out, the condoling with some good man in affliction.

Ver. 341. For him alone, hope leads from goal to goal, &c.] Plato, in his first book of a Republic, hath a remarkable passage to this purpose: "He whose conscience does not reproach him, has cheerful hope for his companion, and the support and comfort of his old age, according to Pindar. For this great poet, O Socrates, very elegantly says, That he who leads a just and holy life, has always amiable hope for his companion, which fills his heart with joy, and is the support and comfort of his old age. Hope, the most powerful of the divinities, in governing the ever-changing and inconstant temper of mortal men." In the same manner Euripides speaks in his Hercules Furens: "He is the good man in whose breast hope springs eternally. But to be without hope in the world, is the portion of the wicked."

Ver. 373. Come then, my friend! &c.] This noble apostrophe, by which the poet concludes the Essay in an address to his friend, will furnish a critic with examples of every one of those five species of elocution, from which, as from its sources, Longinus deduceth the sublime.

1. The first and chief is a grandeur and sublimity of conception:

2. The second, that pathetic enthusiasm, which, at the same time, melts and inflames:

3. A certain elegant formation and ordonance of figures:

4. A splendid diction:

5. And fifthly, which includes in itself all the rest, a weight and dignity in the composition:

NOTES OF W. WARBURTON ON THE UNIVERSAL PRAYER.

Universal Prayer.] It may be proper to observe, that some passages in the preceding Essay, having been unjustly suspected of a tendency towards fate and naturalism, the author composed this prayer as the sum of all, to show that his system was founded in free-will, and terminated in piety; that the First Cause was as well the Lord and Governor of the Universe as the Creator of it; and that, by submission to his will (the great principle enforced throughout the Essay), was not meant suffering ourselves to be carried along by a blind determination, but resting in a religious acquiescence, and confidence full of hope and immortality. To give all this the greater weight, the poet chose for his model the Lord's Prayer, which, of all others, best deserves the title prefixed to his paraphrase.

As the imparting of grace, on the Christian system, is a stronger exertion of the divine power than the natural illumination of the heart, one would expect that right and wrong should change places, more aid being required to restore men to right, than to keep them in it. But as it was the poet's purpose to insinuate that revelation was the right, nothing could better express his purpose, than making the right secured by the guards of grace.

END OF VOL. II.

BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.