enumerating the titles and various places of abode of this goddefs. He has undoubt→ edly personified her at the beginning, but he feems to have dropped that idea in the feventh line, where the deity is fuddenly transformed into a plant; from thence this metaphor of a vegetable is carried on diftinctly through the eleven succeeding lines, till he fuddenly returns to confider Happiness again as a perfon, in the eighteenth line, And filed from monarchs, St. John, dwells with thee. For to fly and to dwell, cannot justly be predicated of the same subject, that immediately before was defcribed as twining with laurels, and being reaped in harvests. Or the numberless treatifes that have been written on Happiness, one of the most fenfible is that of Fontenelle, in the third volume of his works. Our author's leading principle is, that Happiness is attainable by all men ; For mourn our various portions as we please So So Horace also in Epift. 18. B. i. Æquum mî animum ipse parabo. "But Horace (fays a penetrating obferver on human life) was grofsly mistaken: the thing for which he thought he stood in no need of Jupiter's affiftance, was what he could leaft expect from his own ability. It is much more easy to get even riches and honours by one's industry, than a quiet and contented mind. If it be faid, that riches and honours depend on a thousand things which we cannot difpofe of at pleasure, and that therefore it is neceffary to pray to God that he would turn them to our advantage; I answer, that the filence of the paffions, and the tranquillity and ease of the mind, depend upon a thousand things that are not under our jurisdiction. The ftomach, the spleen, the lymphatic vessels, the fibres of the brain, and a hundred other organs, whose seat and figure are yet unknown to the anatomifts, produce in us many uncasinesses, jealoufies, and vexations. Can we alter thofe organs? Are they in our own power ?” 47. When I 47. When nature ficken'd, and each gale was death THIS is a verse of a marvellous comprehenfion and exprefliveness. The direfulnefs of this peftilence is more emphatically fet forth in these few words, than in forty fuch odes as Sprat's on the plague at Athens +. 48. What makes all phyfical or moral ill? There deviates Nature, and here wanders Will ‡. POPE here accounts for the introduction of moral evil from the abuse of man's free will. This is the folid and scriptural solution of that grand and difficult question, which in vain hath puzzled and bewildered the fpeculatifts of fo many ages, Toder To xaxov. Milton, in one of his fmaller and neglected poems, has left us a fublime paffage founded on the Chriftian doctrine of the Fall, and of the preceding harmony of all things. κακον. * Ver. 108. + Ταυθ' ότι μεν εςιν ισχυρά, και σιβαρα, και αξιωμα Tina. He elsewhere commends a writer, on account of his, JUKVOTATOS, Xas grottes. Dionyf. Halicarnaff. συνθέσεωσ τμ. κβ. † Ver. 111. That 49. That we on earth with undiscording voice To their great Lord, whofe love their motion sway'd In In firit obedience, and their state of good * A better wou'd you fix? Then give Humility a coach and fix †. Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow; Not one looks backward, onward ftill he goes, IN a work of fo ferious and fevers a caft, in a work of reasoning, in a work of theology, defigned to explain the most interesting fubject that can employ the mind of man, furely fuch strokes of levity, of satire, of ridicule, however poignant and witty, are ill placed and disgusting, are vio • At a Solemn Mufic, vol. ii. pag. 39. lations of that propriety which POPE in general fo ftrictly obferved. Lucretius preferves throughout, the dignity he at first affumed; even his farcafms and irony on the fuperftitious, have fomething august, and a noble haughtiness in them; as in particular where he asks how it comes to pass that Jupiter fometimes ftrikes his own temples with his thunderbolts; whether he employs himself in cafting them in the deferts for the fake of exercising his arm; and why he hurls them in places where he cannot strike the guilty. -Tum fulmina mittat ; et ædes, Sæpe fuas difturbet, et in deferta recedens He has turned the infult into a magnificent image. 50. Heroes are much the fame, the point's agreed, From Macedonia's madman to the Swede, THE modern Alexander has been thus characterized by the British Juvenal, in • Lib. ii. ver. 1100. lines |