already quoted from the "Rape of the Lock" he talks of casting shrieks to heaven, - a performance of some difficulty, except when cast is needed to rhyme with last.

But the supposition is that in the "Essay on Man" Pope did not himself know what he was writing. He was only the condenser and epigrammatizer of Bolingbroke, a very fitting St. John for such a gospel. Or, if he did know, we can account for the contradictions by supposing that he threw in some of the commonplace moralities to conceal his real drift. Johnson asserts that Bolingbroke in private laughed at Pope's having been made the mouthpiece of opinions which he did not hold. But this is hardly probable when we consider the relations between them. It is giving Pope altogether too little credit for intelligence to suppose that he did not understand the principles of his intimate friend. The caution with which he at first concealed the authorship would argue that he had doubts as to the reception of the poem. When it was attacked on the score of infidelity, he gladly accepted Warburton's championship, and assumed whatever pious interpretation he contrived to thrust upon it. The beginning of the poem is familiar to everybody: :

"Awake, 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";

To expatiate o'er a mighty maze is rather loose

writing, but the last verse, as it stood in the original editions, was,

"A mighty maze of walks without a plan; and perhaps this came nearer Pope's real opinion than the verse he substituted for it. Warburton is careful not to mention this variation in his notes. The poem is everywhere as remarkable for its confusion of logic as it often is for ease of verse and grace of expression. An instance of both occurs in a passage frequently quoted:

"Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate;
All but the page prescribed, their present state;
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know,
Or who would suffer being here below?

The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,

Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,

And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.

O, blindness to the future kindly given
That each may fill the circle meant by heaven!
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,

A hero perish or a sparrow fall,

Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,

And now a bubble burst, and now a world!"

Now, if "heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate," why should not the lamb "skip and play," if he had the reason of man? Why, because he would then be able to read the book of fate. But if man himself cannot, why, then, could the lamb with the reason of man? For, if the lamb had the reason of man, the book of fate would still be hidden, so far as himself was concerned. If the inferences we can draw from appearances are equivalent to a knowledge of destiny, the know

ing enough to take an umbrella in cloudy weather might be called so. There is a manifest confusion between what we know about ourselves and about other people; the whole point of the passage being that we are always mercifully blinded to our own future, however much reason we may possess. There is also inaccuracy as well as inelegance in saying,

"Heaven,

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,

A hero perish or a sparrow fall."

To the last verse Warburton, desirous of reconciling his author with Scripture, appends a note referring to Matthew x. 29: "Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing? and one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father." It would not have been safe to have referred to the thirtyfirst verse: "Fear ye not, therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows."

To my feeling, one of the most beautiful passages in the whole poem is that familiar one:

"Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored 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 given
Behind the cloud-topt hill a humbler heaven;
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the watery waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.
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."

But this comes in as a corollary to what went just before:

66

Hope springs eternal in the human breast,

Man never is but always to be blest;

The soul, uneasy, and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come."

Then follows immediately the passage about the poor Indian, who, after all, it seems, is contented with merely being, and whose soul, therefore, is an exception to the general rule. And what have the "solar walk" (as he calls it) and "milky way" to do with the affair? Does our hope of heaven depend on our knowledge of astronomy Or does he mean that science and faith are necessarily hostile? And, after being told that it is the "untutored mind" of the savage which “ sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind," we are rather surprised to find that the lesson the poet intends to teach is that

"All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul,

That, changed through all, and yet in all the same,
Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame,

Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,

Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees."

So that we are no better off than the untutored Indian, after the poet has tutored us. Dr. Warburton makes a rather lame attempt to ward off the charge of Spinozism from this last passage. He would have found it harder to show that the acknowledgment of any divine revelation woukl not overturn the greater part of its teachings. If Pope intended by his poem all that the bishop

takes for granted in his commentary, we must deny him what is usually claimed as his first merit,

clearness. If he did not, we grant him clearness as a writer at the expense of sincerity as a man. Perhaps a more charitable solution of the difficulty would be, that Pope's precision of thought was no match for the fluency of his verse.

Lord Byron goes so far as to say, in speaking of Pope, that he who executes the best, no matter what his department, will rank the highest. I think there are enough indications in these letters of Byron's, however, that they were written rather more against Wordsworth than for Pope. The rule he lays down would make Voltaire a greater poet, in some respects, than Shakespeare. Byron cites Petrarch as an example; yet if Petrarch had put nothing more into his sonnets than execution, there are plenty of Italian sonneteers who would be his match. But, in point of fact, the department chooses the man and not the man the department, and it has a great deal to do with our estimate of him. Is the department of Milton no higher than that of Butler? Byron took especial care not to write in the style he commended. But I think Pope has received quite as much credit in respect even of execution as he deserves. Surely execution is not confined to versification alone. What can be worse than this?

"At length Erasmus, that great, injured name,
(The glory of the priesthood and the shame,)
Stemmed the wild torrent of a barbarous age,
And drove those holy vandals off the stage."