Chapter XXXVI: Appendix (12)

[1505] That is, "the politic and wise" are "no less alike" than the heroes, of whom he had said, ver. 219, that they had all the same characteristics.

[1506] Shakespeare, Richard II. Act i. Sc. 3: "The sly, slow hours."

[1507] "'Tis phrase absurd" is one of those departures from pure English which would only be endurable in familiar poetry.

[1508] The pronunciation of "great" was not uniform in Pope's day. "When I published," says Johnson, "the plan for my Dictionary, Lord Chesterfield told me that the word 'great' should be pronounced so as to rhyme to 'state,' and Sir William Yonge sent me word that it should be pronounced so as to rhyme to 'seat,' and that none but an Irishman would pronounce it 'grait.'" Pope, in this epistle, and elsewhere, has made "great" rhyme to both sounds.

[1509] Marcus Aurelius, who regulated his life by the lofty principles of the Stoics, was born A.D. 121 and died 180. The man, says Pope, who aims at noble ends by noble means is great, whether he attains his end or fails, whether he reigns like Aurelius or perishes like Socrates.

[1510] Considering the manner in which Socrates was put to death, the word "bleed" seems to be improperly used.--WARTON.

[1511] Wollaston, Religion of Nature, sect. v. prop. 19: "Fame lives but in the breath of the people."

[1512] Is depreciating the passion for fame consistent with the doctrine before advanced, Epist. ii. ver. 290, that "not a vanity is giv'n in vain?"--WARTON.

[1513] This is said to Bolingbroke.

[1514] Celebrated men are aware that their reputation spreads wide, and whether fame is valuable or worthless, "all that is felt of it" does not "begin and end in the small circle of friends and foes."

[1515] The men of renown,--the Shakespeares, Bacons, and Newtons,--can never be "empty shades" while we have the works which were the fruit of their prodigious intellects. When the wealth of a great mind is preserved to posterity we possess a principal part of the man, and if in the next world he takes no cognisance of his fame in this, it is we that are the empty shades to him; he is a substance and a power to us.

[1516] Wakefield says that "but for his political bias Pope would have written, 'A Marlb'rough living.'" But Marlborough died in 1722, and the point of Pope's line consisted in opposing the example of a living man to a dead.

[1517] The "wit" is not to be taken here in its narrow modern sense of a jester. Pope is deriding fame in general, and divides famous men into two classes,--"heroes and the wise." The wise, such as Shakespeare, Bacon, and Newton, are compared to feathers, which are flimsy and showy; and the heroes, who are the scourges of mankind, are compared to rods.

[1518] "Honest" was formerly used in a less confined sense than at present, but the word has never been adequate to designate "the noblest work of God."

[1519] Pope has hitherto spoken of all fame. He now speaks of bad fame, and this was never supposed to be an element of happiness.

[1520] He alludes to the disinterment of the bodies of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton on Jan. 30, 1661, the anniversary of the execution of Charles I. The putrid corpses were hung for the day upon a gibbet at Tyburn, were decapitated at night, and the heads fixed on the front of Westminster Hall. The trunks were buried in a hole dug near the gibbet.

[1521] Marcellus was an opponent of Cæsar, and a partisan of Pompey. After the battle of Pharsalia he retired to Mitylene, was pardoned by Cæsar at the request of the senate, and assassinated by an attendant on his way back to Rome. His moral superiority over Cæsar is conjecture. Warton mentions that "by Marcellus Pope was said to mean the Duke of Ormond," a man of small abilities, and a tool of Bolingbroke and Oxford. He fled from England at the death of Queen Anne, joined the court of the Pretender, and being attainted had to pass the rest of his life abroad. He died at Madrid, Nov. 16, 1745, aged 94. One version of the couplet in the MS. has the names of Walpole, and the jacobite member of parliament, Shippen:

And more contentment honest Sh[ippen] feels
Than W[alpole] with a senate at his heels.

[1522] So Lord Lansdowne of Cato:

More loved, more praised, more envied in his doom,
Than Cæsar trampling on the rights of Rome.--WAKEFIELD.

[1523] "Superior parts" are ranked by Pope among "external goods," which is a palpable error. Nothing can be less external to a man than his mind.

[1524] Which does not hinder our advancing with delight from truth to truth, nor are we depressed because, to quote Pope's language, Epist. i. ver. 71, "our knowledge is measured to our state and place."

[1525] In the interests of charity, humility, and self-improvement, it were to be wished that this was the universal result of superior intelligence.

[1526] Pope objects that wise men are "condemned to drudge," which is not an evil peculiar to the tasks of wise men, and so immensely does the pleasure of mental exercise preponderate over the weariness, that a taste for philosophy, letters, and science is one of the surest preservatives against the tedium of life. He objects that the wise have no one to second or judge them rightly, which never happens. The most neglected genius wins disciples from the beginning, who make up in weight what they want in number, and were the adherents fewer, the capacity which conceives important truths would be self-sustained from the consciousness that truth is mighty and will prevail.

[1527] The allusion is to Bolingbroke's patriotic pretensions, and political impotence. The cause of his want of success is reversed by Pope. He was understood well enough, and nobody trusted him in consequence. His selfish, unprincipled ambition was too transparent.

[1528] To a person that was praising Dr. Balguy's admirable discourses on the Vanity and Vexation of our Pursuits after Knowledge, he replied, "I borrowed the whole from ten lines of the Essay on Man, ver. 259-268, and I only enlarged upon what the poet had expressed with such marvellous conciseness, penetration, and precision." He particularly admired ver. 266.--WARTON.

The exclamation "painful pre-eminence," is from Addison's Cato, Act iii. Sc. 5, where Cato applies the phrase to his own situation.

[1529] This line is inconsistent with ver. 261-2. A man who feels painfully his own ignorance and faults is not "above life's weakness." The line is also inconsistent with ver. 310. No one can be above life's weakness who is not transcendent in virtue, and then he cannot be above "life's comfort," since Pope says, that "virtue alone is happiness below." The melancholy picture, again, which the passage presents of the species of martyrdom endured by Bolingbroke from his intellectual pre-eminence, is inconsistent with ver. 18, where Pope says that perfect happiness has fled from kings to dwell with St. John.

[1530] "Call" for "call forth."

[1531] Lord Umbra may have stood for a dozen insignificant peers who had the ribbon of some order. Sir Billy was Sir William Yonge, who was made a Knight of the Bath when the order was revived in May, 1725. "Without having done anything," says Lord Hervey, "out of the common track of a ductile courtier, and a parliamentary tool, his name was proverbially used to express everything pitiful, corrupt, and contemptible." His one talent was a fluency which sounded like eloquence, and meant nothing, and this ready flow of specious language, unaccompanied by solid reasoning or conviction, and always exerted on behalf of his patron, Walpole, rendered his unconditional subserviency conspicuous.

[1532] Mr. Croker suggests that Gripus and his wife may be Mr. Wortley Montagu and Lady Mary. Pope accused them both of greed for money.

[1533] Oldham:

The greatest, bravest, wittiest of mankind.--BOWLES.

[1534] From Cowley, Translation of Virgil:

Charmed with the foolish whistlings of a name.--HURD.

[1535] This resembles some lines in Roscommon's Essay:

That wretch, in spite of his forgotten rhymes,
Condemned to live to all succeeding times.--WAKEFIELD.

Pope's examples would not bear out his language unless Bacon and Cromwell were generally reprobated, whereas both have distinguished champions and innumerable adherents.

[1536] MS.:

In one man's fortune, mark and scorn them all.

The "ancient story" was a pretence which Pope inserted when he turned the invective against the Duke of Marlborough into a general satire upon a class.

[1537] Mr. Croker asks "who was happy to ruin and betray?--the favourite or the sovereign?" The language is confused, but "their" in the next line refers to those who "ruin" and "betray," and shows that the favourites were meant. They were happy to ruin those--the kings, to betray these--the queens. The couplet made part of the attack upon the Duke of Marlborough, and the words of ver. 290 were borrowed from Burnet, who said in his defence of the Duke, "that he was in no contrivance to ruin or betray" James II. While, however, he was a trusted officer in the army of James he entered into a secret league with the Prince of Orange, and deserted to him on his landing. The accusation of lying in the arms of a queen, and afterwards betraying her, alludes, says Wakefield, to Marlborough's youthful intrigue with the Duchess of Cleveland, the mistress of Charles II., and we need not reject the interpretation because the mistress of a king is not a queen, or because there is no ground for believing that Marlborough betrayed her. Pope constantly sacrificed accuracy of language to glitter of style, and historic truth to satirical venom.

[1538] In the MS. "great * * grows," that is, great Churchill or Marlbro'.--CROKER.

[1539] MS.:

One equal course how guilt and greatness ran.

[1540] This couplet and the next have a view to his supposed peculation as commander-in-chief, and his prolongation of the war on this account.--WAKEFIELD.

The charges were the calumnies of an infuriated faction. His military career while he was commander-in-chief was free from reproach. He was never known to sanction an act of wanton harshness, or to exceed the recognised usages of war. The pretence that he prolonged the contest for the sake of gain does not require a refutation, for his accusers could never produce a fragment of colourable evidence in support of the allegation. The Duke of Wellington ridiculed the notion, and said that however much Marlborough might have loved money he must have loved his military reputation more. The poet, who denounced him as a man "stained with blood," and "infamous for plundered provinces," could, at ver. 100, call Turenne "god-like," though he gave the atrocious command to pillage and burn the Palatinate, and turned it into a smouldering desert. "Habit," says Sismondi, "had rendered him insensible to the sufferings of the people, and he subjected them to the most cruel inflictions."

[1541] MS.:

Let gathered nations next their chief behold,
How blessed with conquest, yet more blessed with gold:
Go then, and steep thy age in wealth and ease,
Stretched on the spoils of plundered provinces.

[1542] "Acts of fame" are not the best means of "sanctifying" wealth. True charity is unostentatious.

[1543] Wakefield quotes Horace, Od. ii. 2, or, as Creech puts it in his translation, silver has no brightness,

Unless a moderate use refine,
A value give, and make it shine.

[1544] Dryden, Virg. Æn. iv. 250:

But called it marriage, by that specious name
To veil the crime, and sanctify the shame.--WAKEFIELD.

[1545] Originally, "Ambition, avarice, and th' imperious" etc., for Marlborough was never the dupe of a "greedy minion."

[1546] "Storied halls" are halls painted with stories or histories, as in Milton, Il Penseroso, ver. 159:

And storied windows richly dight
Casting a dim religious light.

The walls and ceiling of the saloon at Blenheim are painted with figures and trophies, and some rooms are hung with tapestry commemorating the great sieges and battles of the Duke. The tapestry, which was manufactured in the Netherlands, and was a present from the Dutch, is described by Dyer in The Fleece, Book iii. ver. 499-517.

[1547] Addison's Verses on the Play-House:

A lofty fabric does the sight invade,
And stretches o'er the waves a pompous shade.--WAKEFIELD.

[1548] Pope may mean that nothing affords happiness which infringes virtue, and this would contradict the conclusion of the second epistle, where he dwells upon the continuous happiness we derive from follies and vanities. Or he may mean that virtue is by itself complete happiness, whatever else may be our circumstances, which would contradict ver. 119, where he says that the "virtuous son is ill at ease" when he inherits a "dire disease" from his profligate father.

[1549] The allusion here seems to be to the pole, or central point, of a spherical body, which, during the rotatory motion of every other part, continues immoveable and at rest.--WAKEFIELD.

The "human bliss" does not "stand still," unless we believe that the virtuous man suffers nothing when his virtue subjects him to scorn, persecution, and tortures.

[1550] "It" in this couplet and the next stands for virtuous "merit."

[1551] Merchant of Venice, Act iv. Sc. 1:

it is twice blessed;
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.

[1552] Immortality must be the "end" which it will be "unequalled joy to gain," and yet "no pain to lose," since the annihilated will not be conscious of the loss. Lord Byron expressed the same idea in a letter, Dec 8, 1821: "Indisputably, the believers in the gospel have a advantage over all others,--for this simple reason, that, if true, they will have their reward hereafter, and if there be no hereafter, they can be but with the infidel in his eternal sleep, having had the assistance of an exalted hope through life." Pope and Byron leave out of their reckoning the sufferings to which christians are constantly exposed through their homage to christianity.

[1553] After ver. 316 in the MS.:

Ev'n while it seems unequal to dispose,
And chequers all the good man's joys with woes,
'Tis but to teach him to support each state,
With patience this, with moderation that;
And raise his base on that one solid joy,
Which conscience gives, and nothing can destroy.--WARBURTON.

The sense in the first line is not completed. Virtue "seems unequal to dispose" something, but we are not told what.

[1554] This is the Greek expression, πλατυς γελως, broad or wide laughter, derived, I presume, from the greater aperture of the mouth in loud laughter.--WAKEFIELD.

[1555] MS.:

More pleasing, then, humanity's soft tears
Than all the mirth unfeeling folly wears.

There are numerous grades of character between "unfeeling folly" and christian excellence, and many gratifications of the earthly-minded are assuredly more pleasant for the time than the sharp and ennobling pangs of suffering virtue.

[1556] MS.:

Which not by starts, and from without acquired,
Is all ways exercised, and never tired.

[1557] Is it so impossible that a "wish" should "remain" when Pope has just said that virtue is "never elated while one oppressed man" exists? Or has virtue in tears, ver. 320, no wish for that happiness which Pope says, ver. 1, is "our being's end and aim?" Or is the "wish" for "more virtue" fulfilled by the act of wishing, without frequent failure, and perpetual conflict, and prolonged self-denial?

[1558] "The good" is singular, and stands for "the good man," as is required by the verbs "takes," "looks," "pursues," etc., up to the end of the paragraph.

[1559] Creech's Horace, Epist. i. 1, ver. 23:

But if you ask me now what sect I own,
I swear a blind obedience unto none.--WAKEFIELD.

[1560] Bolingbroke's Letters to Pope: "The modest enquirer follows nature, and nature's God."--WAKEFIELD.

[1561] MS.:

Let us, my S[t. John], this plain truth confess,
Good nature makes, and keeps our happiness;
And faith and morals end as they began,
All in the love of God, and love of man.

In his second epistle Pope maintains that we are born with the germ of an unalterable ruling passion which grows with our growth, and swallows up every other passion. Among these ruling passions he specifies spleen, hate, fear, anger, etc., which are dispensed by fate, absorb the entire man, and of necessity exclude love. Here, on the contrary, we are told, ver. 327-340, that "the sole bliss heaven could on _all_ bestow," is the virtue which "ends in love of God and love of man."

[1562] He hopes, indeed, for another life, but he does not from hence infer the absolute necessity of it, in order to vindicate the justice and goodness of God.--WARTON.

[1563] The "other kind" is the animal creation, which, says Pope, has not been given any abortive instinct. Nature, which furnishes the impulse, never fails to provide appropriate objects for its gratification.

[1564] The meaning of this couplet comes out clearer in the prose explanation which Pope has written on his MS.: "God implants a desire of immortality, which at least proves he would have us think of, and expect it, and he gives no appetite in vain to any creature. As God plainly gave this hope, or instinct, it is plain man should entertain it. Hence flows his greatest hope, and greatest incentive to virtue."

[1565] "His greatest virtue" is benevolence; "his greatest bliss" the hope of a happy eternity. Nature connects the two, for the bliss depends on the virtue.

[1566] Pope exalts the duty of "benevolence," which, ver. 371, causes "earth to smile with boundless bounty blessed." But bounty cannot benefit the recipients, if the poet is right in maintaining that happiness is independent of externals.

[1567] Warton remarks that this simile, which is copied from Chaucer, was used by Pope in two other places,--The Temple of Fame, ver. 436, and the Dunciad, ii. ver. 407.

[1568] Waller, Divine Love, Canto v.:

A love so unconfined
With arms extended would embrace mankind.
Self-love would cease, or be dilated, when
We should behold as many selfs as men.--WAKEFIELD.

[1569] MS.:

To rise from individuals to the whole
Is the true progress of the god-like soul.
The first impression the soft passions make,
Like the small pebble in the limpid lake,
Begets a greater and a greater still,
The circle widening till the whole it fill;
Till God and man, and brute and reptile kind
All wake, all move, all agitate his mind;
Earth with his bounteous overflows is blessed;
Heav'n pleased beholds its image in his breast.
Parent or friend first touch the virtuous mind,
His country next, and next all human kind.

[1570] In the MS. thus:

And now transported o'er so vast a plain,
While the winged courser flies with all her rein,
While heav'n-ward now her mounting wing she feels,
Now scattered fools fly trembling from her heels,
Wilt thou, my St. John! keep her course in sight,
Confine her fury, and assist her flight?--WARBURTON.

The exaggerated estimate which Pope had formed of the Essay on Man is apparent from this passage. With respect to the poetry, "the winged courser flew with all her rein;" with respect to the argument, "scattered fools flew trembling" from its crushing power.

[1571] "Stoops to man's low passions or ascends to the glorious ends" for which those passions have been given.

[1572] "Did he rise with temper," asks the writer of A Letter to Mr. Pope, 1735, "when he drove furiously out of the kingdom the Duke of Marlborough? or did he fall with dignity when he fled from justice, and joined the Pretender?" Lord Hervey asserts, and many circumstances confirm his testimony, that Bolingbroke "was elate and insolent in power, dejected and servile in disgrace."

[1573] Boileau's Art of Poetry, translated by Soame and Dryden, Cantos i.:

Happy, who in his verse can gently steer
From grave to light, from pleasant to severe.--WAKEFIELD.

[1574] MS.:

And while the muse transported, unconfined,
Soars to the sky, or stoops among mankind,
Teach her like thee, through various fortune wise,
With dignity to sink, with temper rise;
Formed by thy converse, steer an equal flight
From grave to gay, from profit to delight
Artful with grace, and natural to please,
Intent in business, elegant in ease.

[1575] From Statius, Silv. Lib. i. Carm. iv. 120:

immensæ veluti connexa carinæ
Cymba minor, cum sævit hyems, pro parte, furentes
Parva receptat aquas, et eodem volvitur austro.--HURD.

Mr. Pope forgot while he wrote ver. 383-6, the censures he had so justly cast, ver. 237, upon that vain desire of an useless immortality--CROUSAZ.

[1576] An unfortunate prophecy. Posterity has more than confirmed the contempt in which Bolingbroke's character was held by his contemporaries.

[1577] "Pretend" is used in the old and literal sense "to stretch out before any one." Its exact synonym in Pope's line is "proclaim."

[1578] Pope professes to believe that all his poetry up to the Essay on Man was made up of "sounds" to the exclusion of "things," and was addressed as little "to the heart" as to the understanding. His change of subject, and his panegyrics on virtue, had at least not taught him that the manly simplicity of truth was to be preferred to insincere hyperboles.

[1579] In the MS. thus:

That just to find a God is all we can,
And all the study of mankind is man.--WARBURTON.

The MS. has another version of the couplet in the text:

And all our knowledge, all our bliss below,
To love our neighbour, and ourselves to know.

[1580] The rule of Horace and Warton for testing poetry was to divest it of metre by changing the order of the words. The language of Bowles would give the idea that the change was to be from one measure and set of rhymes to another.

[1581] Voltaire, Œuvres, tom. xiv. p. 169.

[1582] Epist. iv. ver. 112.

[1583] Epist. iv. ver. 111-113.

[1584] Epist. iv. ver. 121.

[1585] Archbishop Whately, Bacon's Essays, p. 145, quotes this stanza, and says that it is strange that Pope, and those who use similar language, should have "failed to perceive that the pagan nations were in reality atheists. For by the word God we understand an Eternal Being, who made and who governs all things. And so far were the ancient pagans from believing that 'in the beginning God made the heavens and the earth,' that, on the contrary, the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and many other natural objects, were among the very gods they adored. Accordingly, the apostle Paul expressly calls the ancient pagans, atheists, Ephes. ii. 12, though he well knew that they worshipped certain supposed superior beings which they called gods. But he says in the Epistle to the Romans that 'they worshipped the creature more than, that is, instead of the Creator.' And at Lystra, when the people were going to do sacrifice to him and Barnabas, mistaking them for two of their gods, he told them to 'turn from those vanities to serve the living God, who made heaven and earth.'" The pagans were equally ignorant of the holiness of the Supreme Being; and Pope himself, describing the heathen divinities, Essay on Man, Epist. iii. 257, calls them

Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust,
Whose attributes were rage, revenge, or lust.

Such a divinity was Jupiter, and to worship an abominable phantom, conspicuous for "rage, revenge, and lust," was not to adore "Jehovah."

[1586] It ought to be "confinedst" or "didst confine," and afterwards "gavedst" or "didst give" in the second person.--WARTON.

[1587] This may mean that the Deity was beneficent, or holy, or both, but whatever sense Pope attached to the word, he held with Bolingbroke that the attributes of the Divine Being were not the qualities which passed by the same name among us, and the present stanza is a re-assertion of the doctrine of the Essay on Man, Epist. ii. 1, that we must not "presume to scan God," or think to know more than the bare fact that he is "good."

[1588] First edition:

Left conscience free and will.

Here followed, if it is genuine, a suppressed stanza, which Mrs. Thrale repeated to Dr. Johnson, and which she said a clergyman of their acquaintance had discovered:

Can sins of moments claim the rod
Of everlasting fires?
And that offend great nature's God
Which nature's self inspires

Mrs. Thrale called the stanza "licentious," Johnson observed that it was borrowed from the Pastor Fido of Guarini, and Boswell pointed out that a "rod of fires" was an incongruous metaphor. "I warrant you, however," said Johnson, "Pope wrote this stanza, and some friend struck it out." The folly of the lines is transparent. The "sins" with which "nature's self inspires" man, "conscience warns him not to do," ver. 14, and Pope assumes that God will never be "offended" if we disregard conscience, and yield to temptation.

[1589] This stanza was evidently directed against the ascetic acts which were rated high among virtues by the papists.

[1590] There is something elevated in the idea and expression,

Or think Thee Lord alone of man,
When thousand worlds are round;

but the conclusion is a contrast of littleness,

And deal damnation round the land.--BOWLES.

[1591] Unquestionably no man of right judgment will pronounce the holder of any opinion to be beyond the limits of divine mercy; but he may justly pronounce the opinion itself to be ruinous in the highest degree. Nothing can be more false than the spurious liberality which presumes all opinions to be equally innocent, or affects to conceive that man is answerable only for the sincerity of his convictions. He is accountable for his opportunities, his understanding, and his knowledge, and if he espouses error through negligence, prejudice, or presumption, he involves himself in the full criminality of his error.--CROLY.

[1592] I have often wondered that the same poet who wrote the Dunciad should have written these lines. Alas for Pope, if the mercy he showed to others was the measure of the mercy he received.--COWPER.

[1593] Lucan, ix. 578:

Estne Dei sedes, nisi terra, et pontus, et aer,
Et cœlum, et virtus?--WAKEFIELD.

[1594] Erudition and acuteness are not the only requisites of a good commentator. That conformity of sentiment which enables him fully to enter into the intention of his author, and that fairness of disposition which places him above every wish of disguising or misrepresenting it, are qualifications not less essential. In these points it is no breach of candour to affirm, since the public voice has awarded the sentence, that Dr. Warburton has, in various of his critical labours, shown himself extremely defective, and perhaps in none more than in those he has expended upon this performance, his manifest purposes in which, have been to give it a systematic perfection that it does not possess, to conceal as much as possible the suspicious source whence the author derived his leading ideas, and to reduce the whole to the standard of moral orthodoxy. So much is the sense of the poet strained and warped by these processes of his commentator, that it is scarcely possible in many places to enter into his real meaning, without laying aside the commentary, and letting the text speak for itself--AIKIN.

[1595] Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, vol. i. p. 377.

[1596] Descartes.

[1597] Soame Jenyns, who published in 1757 a Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil.

[1598] All three were republicans who flourished at the period of the Great Rebellion. Harrington published his political work, Oceana, in 1656, and Neville his Plato Redivivus, or A Dialogue concerning Government, in 1681. Burnet says of Wildman that he "had been a constant meddler on all occasions in everything that looked like sedition, and seemed inclined to oppose everything that was uppermost." He served in the Parliamentary army, and proved troublesome to Cromwell, who imprisoned him. His restless republicanism was thought dangerous at the Restoration, and the government kept him under lock and key for some years. He survived to take a share in the Revolution of 1688, and was as hard to please as in his younger days. Pepys says in 1667, that he had been "a false fellow to everybody."

[1599] In the Commentary on ver. 303.

[1600] A false pretence. Waterland expressed his disapproval of Warburton's Divine Legation, and Jackson wrote a formal refutation. Warburton, as sensitive as he was abusive, never forgave them, and to revenge his wounded vanity, he thrust this forced digression into the middle of Pope's works under the hollow plea that Pope seemed to have had in his mind the controversy between Jackson and Waterland on the Trinity. Jackson was an Arian clergyman, who defended the views of Samuel Clarke.

[1601] Tindal, who was a deist, published in 1730 his well-known work, Christianity as old as the Creation. Waterland wrote an answer called Scripture Vindicated, and Jackson, his Remarks on a book entitled, etc.

[1602] Waterland published a sermon called, A familiar discourse upon the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and the use and importance of it; and Jackson, after publishing in 1734 his treatise On the Existence and Unity of God, followed it up in 1735, with A Defence of the book entitled, On the Existence, etc., in answer to Law's Enquiry into the Ideas of Space, Time, etc. Warburton, in his discreditable note, has not the candour to allude to the real ground of his rancour against Jackson and Waterland.

[1603] Nothing was ever more unfortunate than these five examples of sublimity, all of which, as Dr. Warton observes, prove the contrary.--BOWLES.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

Except as noted below, obvious punctuation inconsistencies and typographical errors and spelling errors have been corrected.

Except as noted below, spelling and capitalization inconsistencies have been retained.

Pope often wrote names with dashes replacing part of the name, as in 'Sw--y'. The dashes look like em-dashes in the original, but they have been changed to long dashes; thus, 'Sw----y'.

On the title page, in the phrase "RT. HON. JOHN WILSON CROKER.", the "T." in "RT." appears as a superscript.

On p. 60, the first footnote (footnote 195) ('This couplet is succeeded by two...') has nothing in the text pointing to it; however the couplet on lines 426 and 427 is marked in pen at the side. This could be the couplet referred to in footnote 195.

On p. 126, the second footnote (footnote 318) ('Spence, p. 178.') has nothing in the text pointing to it; however it seems likely that it refers to the quote ending 'He has an appetite to satire.'

On p. 127, 'terrestial' (in the phrase 'Whose shapes seemed not like to terrestial boys,') was changed to 'terrestrial'.

On the unnumbered page between p. 144 and p. 146, the line in the third footnote (footnote 369), 'If any muse assists the poet's lays' had 'asists' in the original.

On p. 146, in the fourth footnote (footnote 375) the phrase 'I myself, about the year 1790' was 'I myself, about the year year 1790' in the original.

On the unnumbered page before p. 186, the line 'Launched on the bosom of the silver Thames' had 'bosm' in the original.

On p. 231, the third footnote (footnote 576) ('Introduction to the Literature of Europe, 5th ed. vol. i. p. 33....') has nothing in the text pointing to it.

On p. 254, the first footnote (footnote 697) ('The combination "heavenly-fair"...') had nothing in the text pointing to it; a pointer has been added after the first line on the page, which starts 'Oh grace serene!'

On p. 263, in the phrase 'With these precautions, in 1732[3] was published...', the '[3]' does not indicate a footnote. Other footnote indicators in the original were superscripts; this '[3]' was not.

On p. 274, the word 'beforehand' was broken across two lines; it was arbitrarily made 'beforehand' rather than 'before-hand'.

On p. 388, the line 'Through life 'tis followed, ev'en at life's expense' had 'expence' in the original.

On p. 513, the phrase 'He subdued the intractability of all the four elements' had 'intractibility' in the original.