Without satiety, tho' e'er so bless'd,

And but more relish'd as the more distress'd:

The broadest mirth unfeeling Folly wears,

Less pleasing far than Virtue's very tears:

320

Good, from each object, from each place acquir'd,

Which who but feels can taste, but thinks can know:

330

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 God1;
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;

335

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,

340

And opens still, and opens on his soul2;
'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

345

Hope of known bliss, and Faith in bliss unknown:
(Nature, whose dictates to no other kind

Are giv'n in vain, but what they seek they find)

Grasp the whole worlds of Reason, Life, and Sense,

And height of Bliss but height of Charity.

360

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;

Verbatim from Bolingbroke's Letters to Pope. Warton.

[Warburton compares Plato de Republ. 1. c. 5, in which a beautiful passage is quoted from

Pindar (Fragm. 130; and Euripides, Herc. Fur. vv. 105-6. The sublimation of Hope into Faith, of which Pope speaks, constitutes the climax of Campbell's noble poem.]

The centre mov'd, a circle straight succeeds,
Another still, and still another spreads1;
Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace;
His country next; and next all human race;

365

Wide and more wide, th' o'erflowings of the mind
Take ev'ry creature in, of ev'ry kind;

370

Earth smiles around, with boundless bounty blest,
And Heav'n beholds its image in his breast.

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,

375

380

Intent to reason, or polite to please.

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;
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.

390

395

THE UNIVERSAL PRAYER.

DEO OPT. MAX.

[THE Universal Prayer, put forth in 1738, may be fairly ascribed to Pope's desire to avail himself of the Commentary of Warburton, which had been designed to show that the system developed in the Essay on Man recognises freewill and does not logically tend to the establishment of fatalism It can hardly be called a

1 Pope took the simile of the Lake from Chaucer, whose House of Fame he had imitated. (Book II. vv. 280 ff.) Bowles.

2 That Virtue only, &c.] In the MS. thus,

"That just to find a God is all we can And all the Study of Mankind is Man.' Warburton.

3 Universal Prayer.] Concerning this poem,

Paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer, which it only follows at the commencement, and in the last four stanzas. Warton states that the prayer was by 'many orthodox persons' called the Deist's Prayer, and that on account of translating it a French advocate, Le Franc de Pompignan, incurred a reprimand from the Chancellor Aguesseau.]

MORAL ESSAYS,

IN FOUR EPISTLES TO SEVERAL PERSONS.

Est brevitate opus, ut currat sententia, neu se
Impediat verbis lassis onerantibus aures:

Et sermone opus est modo tristi, sæpe jocoso,
Defendente vicem modo Rhetoris atque Poetæ,
Interdum urbani, parcentis viribus, atque

Extenuantis eas consultò.-HOR. [Sat. 1. X. 17—22.]

EPISTLE I.

TO SIR RICHARD TEMPLE, LORD COBHAM1.

ARGUMENT.

Of the Knowledge and Characters of MEN.

THAT it is not sufficient for this knowledge to consider Man in the Abstract: Books will not serve the purpose, nor yet our own Experience singly, v. 1. General maxims, unless they be formed upon both, will be but notional, v. 10. Some Peculiarity in every man, characteristic to himself, yet varying from himself, v. 15. Difficulties arising from our own Passions, Fancies, Faculties, &c. v. 31. The shortness of Life, to observe in, and the uncertainty of the Principles of action in men, to observe by, v. 37, &c. Our own Principle of action often hid from ourselves, V. 41. Some few Characters plain, but in general confounded, dissembled, or inconsistent, v. 51. The same man utterly different in different places and seasons, v. 71. Unimaginable weaknesses in the greatest, v. 70, &c. Nothing constant and certain but God and Nature, v. 95. No judging of the Motives from the actions; the same actions proceeding from contrary Motives, and the same Motives influencing contrary actions, v. 100. II. Yet to form Characters, we can only take the strongest actions of a man's life, and try to make them agree: The utter uncertainty of this, from Nature itself, and from Policy, v. 120. Characters given according to the rank of men of the world, v. 135. And some reason for it, v. 140.

[Sir Richard Temple, created Viscount Cobham by George I. in 1718, and made a Field Marshal in 1742, was on intimate terms with Pope during the latter part of the Poet's life. Pope speaks, in his last letter to Swift, of 'generally rambling in the summer for a month to Lord Cobham's, the Bath, or elsewhere.' (The beauties of Lord Cobham's seat at Stowe are enthusiastically described in the 4th of these Epistles, v. 70 and foll.) Lord Cobham, writing

to Pope from Stowe Nov. 1, 1733, gracefully says that though he has not modesty enough to be pleased with the extraordinary compliment paid him, he has wit enough to know how little he deserves it;' and after declaring the Epistle to be the clearest and cleanest of all' Pope has written, recommends a judicious alteration of a passage which might have militated against the applicability of one of these epithets.]

Education alters the Nature, or at least Character of many, v. 149. Actions, Passions, Opinions, Manners, Humours, or Principles all subject to change. No judging by Nature, from v. 158 to 178. III. It only remains to find (if we can) his RULING PASSION: That will certainly influence all the rest, and can reconcile the seeming or real inconsistency of all his actions, v. 175. Instanced in the extraordinary character of Clodio, v. 179. A caution against mistaking second qualities for first, which will destroy all possibility of the knowledge of mankind, v. 210. Examples of the strength of the Ruling Passion, and its continuation to the last breath, V. 222, &c.

7ES, you despise the man to Books confin'd,

YES

Who from his study rails at human kind;

Tho' what he learns he speaks, and may advance

Some gen'ral maxims, or be right by chance.

The coxcomb bird, so talkative and grave1,

5

That from his cage cries Cuckold, Whore, and Knave,
Tho' many a passenger he rightly call,

You hold him no Philosopher at all.

And yet the fate of all extremes is such,

Men may be read as well as Books, too much?.

ΤΟ

Maxims are drawn from Notions, those from Guess.

Next, that he varies from himself no less:
Add Nature's, Custom's, Reason's, Passion's strife,
And all Opinion's colours cast on life.

Our depths who fathoms, or our shallows finds,
Quick whirls, and shifting eddies, of our minds?
Ön human actions reason tho' you can,

It may be Reason, but it is not Man:
His Principle of action once explore,
That instant 'tis his Principle no more.
Like following life thro' creatures you dissect,
You lose it in the moment you detect.

Yet more; the diff'rence is as great between

The optics seeing, as the object seen.
All Manners take a tincture from our own;
Or come discolour'd thro' our Passions shown.
Or Fancy's beam enlarges, multiplies,
Contracts, inverts, and gives ten thousand dyes.

The coxcomb bird, &c.] A fine turn'd allusion to what Philostratus said of Euxenus, the Tutor of Apollonius, that he could only repeat some sentences of Pythagoras, like those coxcomb birds, who were taught their e pάTTе and their Zevs λews, but knew not what they

signified. Warburton.

2'Say what they will of the great Book of the World, we must read others to know how to read that.' Mad. de Sévigné to M. Rabutin. Warton. [Warburton thinks that the passage in the text covertly refers to the Maxims of Rochefoucault.]