bishop King's Origin of Evil, and to the Moralifts of Lord Shaftesbury, than to the philofophers abovementioned. The late Lord Bathurst repeatedly affured me, that he had read the whole scheme of the Effay on Man, in the hand-writing of Bolingbroke, and drawn up in a series of propofitions, which POPE was to verfify and illustrate. In doing which, our poet, it must be confeffed, left feveral paffages fo expreffed, as to be favourable to fatalism and neceffity, notwithstanding all the pains that can be taken, and the turns that can be given to those paffages, to place them on the fide of religion, and make them coincide with the fundamental doctrines of revelation.

1. Awake*, my St. John! leave all meaner things
To low ambition, and the pride of kings;
Let us (fince life can little more fupply
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.

EPIST. I. V. 1.

Ben Jonson begins a poem thus,
Wake! friend, from forth thy lethargy-

THIS

THIS opening is awful, and commands the attention of the reader. The word awake has peculiar force, and obliquely alludes to his noble friend's leaving his political, for philofophical pursuits. May I venture to obferve, that the metaphors in the fucceeding lines, drawn from the field fports of fetting and shooting, feem below the dignity of the fubject; especially,

EYE nature's walks, SHOOT folly as it flies,
And CATCH the manners living as they RISE.

2. But vindicate the ways of God to man.

This line is taken from Milton;

And juftify the ways of God to man *.

POPE feems to have hinted, by this allufion to the Paradise Loft, that he intended his poem for a defence of providence, as well as Milton: but he took a very different method in pursuing that end; and imagined that the goodness and justice of the Deity might be defended, without hav

• Paradise Loft, b. i. ver, 26.

ing recourfe to the doctrine of a future ftate, and of the depraved state of man.

3.

But of this frame the bearings, and the ties *,
The ftrong connections, nice dependencies,

Gradations juft, has thy pervading foul

Look'd thro'? Or can a part contain the whole?

"IMAGINE only fome perfon entirely a ftranger to navigation, and ignorant of the nature of the fea or waters, how great his aftonishment would be, when finding himfelf on board fome veffel anchoring at fea, remote from all land-prospect, whilst it was yet a calm, he viewed the ponderous machine firm and motionless in the midst of the smooth ocean, and confidered it's foundations beneath, together with it's cordage, mafts, and fails above. How eafily would he see the Whole one regular ftructure, all things depending on one another; the uses of the rooms below, the lodgements, and the conveniencies of men and stores? But being ignorant of the in

Τα μερη προς αυτο το όλον δεν σκοπείν, ει συμφωνα και αρμόζτονία εκείνων Plotinus.

tent

tent or design of all above, would he pronounce the mafts and cordage to be useless and cumbersome, and for this reafon condemn the frame, and despise the architect? O my friend! let us not thus betray our ignorance; but confider where we are, and in what an univerfe. Think of the many parts of the vast machine, in which we have fo little infight, and of which it is impoffible we should know the ends and uses: when instead of seeing to the highest pendants, we fee only fome lower deck, and are in this dark cafe of flesh, confined even to the hold and meaneft ftation of the veffel *." I have inferted this paffage at length,

* Characteristics, vol. ii. pag, 188. edit. 12mo.-There is a close resemblance in the following lines with another paffage of Shaftesbury's Moralifts.

What would this man? Now upward will he foar,
And little less than angel, would be more;
Now looking downwards, juft as griev'd appears
To want the strength of bulls, the fur of bears.

"Afk not merely, why man is naked, why unhoofed, why flower footed than the beafts: Ask, why he has not wings alfo for the air, fins for the water, and so on: that he might take poffeffion of each element, and reign in all.

VOL. II.

F

Not

length, because it is a noble and poetical illustration of the foregoing lines, as well as of many other paffages in this Essay.

4. Prefumptuous man! the reason would'st thou find,
Why form'd fo weak, fo little and fo blind?
First if thou can'ft the harder reafon guess,
Why form'd no weaker, blinder, and no less *.

VOLTAIRE, in the late additions to his works, has the following remarkable words. "I own it flatters me to fee that POPE has fallen upon the very fame fentiment which I had entertained many years ago." "Vous vous étonnez que Dieu ait fait l'homme fi borné, fi ignorant, fi peu heureux. Que ne vous étonnez-vous, qu'il ne l'ait pas fait plus borné, plus ignorant, & plus malheureux? Quand un Français & un Anglais

Not fo, faid I, neither; this would be to rate him high indeed! As if he were by nature, lord of all, which is more than I could willingly allow. 'Tis enough, replied he, that this is yielded. For if we allow once, a fubordination in his cafe, if nature herself be not for man, but man for nature; then muft man, by his good leave, fubmit to the elements of nature, and not the elements to him." Vol. ii. pag. 196, ut fupra.

Vcr. 34.

penfent