POPE. 363 



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 &quot; Rape of the 

 Lock,&quot; 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 &quot;Essay on Man&quot; Pope 

 did not himself know what he was writing. He was only 

 the condenser 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 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 cham 

 pionship, and assumed whatever pious interpretation he 

 contrived to thrust upon it. The beginning of the poem 

 is familiar to everybody : 



&quot; 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 ; &quot; 



To expatiate o er a mighty maze is rather loose writing ; but 

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



&quot; A mighty maze of walks without a plan ; &quot; 



and perhaps this came nearer Pope s real opinion than the 

 verse he substituted for it. Warburton is careful not to 



