304 POPE* 



reasonableness is the theory that Nature would have left hef 

 highest product, man, destitute of that instinct with which she 

 had endowed her other creatures ! As if reason were not the 

 most sublimated form of instinct. The accuracy on which 

 Pope prided himself, and for which he is commended, was 

 not accuracy of thought so much as of expression. And he 

 cannot always even claim this merit, but only that of correct 

 rhyme, as in one of the passages I have 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 con 

 denser and epigrammatiser 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 prin 

 ciples 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 every 

 body: 



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 der 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 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 : 



