362 POPE. 



nature, a more profound satire than Pope himself ever wrote, 

 that his fame should chiefly rest upon the &quot;Essay on Man.&quot; 

 It has been praised and admired by men of the most opposite 

 beliefs, and men of no belief at all. Bishops and free-thinkers 

 have met here on a common ground of sympathetic approval. 

 And, indeed, there is no particular faith in it. It is a droll 

 medley of inconsistent opinions. It proves only two things 

 beyond a question that Pope was not a great thinker ; and 

 that wherever he found a thought, no matter what, he could 

 express it so tersely, so clearly, and with such smoothness of 

 versification, as to give it an everlasting currency. Hobbes s 

 unwieldy Leviathan, left stranded there on the shore of the 

 last age, and nauseous with the stench of its selfishness 

 from this Pope distilled a fragrant oil with which to fill the 

 brilliant lamps of his philosophy lamps like those in the 

 tombs of alchemists, that go out the moment the healthy air 

 is let in upon them. The only positive doctrines in the poem 

 are the selfishness of Hobbes set to music, and the Pantheism 

 of Spinoza brought down from mysticism to commonplace. 

 Nothing can be more absurd than many of the dogmas 

 taught in this &quot; Essay on Man.&quot; For example, Pope 

 affirms explicitly that instinct is something better than 

 reason : 



&quot; See him from Nature rising slow to art, 

 To copy instinct then was reason s part ; 

 Thus, then, to man the voice of nature spake ; 

 Go, from the creatures thy instructions take ; 

 Learn from the beasts what food the thickets yield ; 

 Learn from the birds the physic of the field : 

 The arts of building from the bee receive ; 

 Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave ; 

 Learn of the little nautilus to sail ; 

 Spread the thin oar, or catch the driving gale.&quot; 



I say nothing of the quiet way in which the general term 

 &quot; nature &quot; is substituted for God, but how unutterably void 

 of reasonableness is the theory that Nature would have left 

 her 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 



