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cise and figurative, forcible and elegant. He has many metaphors and images, artfully interspersed in the driest passages, which stood most in need of such ornaments. Nevertheless there are too many lines, in this performance, plain and profaic. The meaner the subject is of a preceptive poem, the more striking appears the art of the poet: It is even of use perhaps to chuse a low subject. In this respect Virgil had the advantage over Lucretius; the latter, with all his vigour and fublimity of genius, could hardly fatisfy and come up to the grandeur of his theme. POPE labours under the same difficulty. If any beauty in this Essay be uncommonly transcendent and peculiar, it is, BREVITY OF DICTION; which, in a few instances, and those pardonable, has occafioned obscurity. It is hardly to be imagined how much sense, how much thinking, how much observation on human life, is condensed together in a small compass. He was so accustomed to confine his thoughts in rhyme, that he tells us, he could express them

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more shortly this way, than in prose itself. On its first publication, POPE did not own it, and it was given by the public to Lord Paget, Dr. Young, Dr. Desaguliers, and others. Even Swift seems to have been deceived: There is a remarkable passage in "I confess I did never one of his letters. imagine you were so deep in morals, or that so many new and excellent rules could be produced so advantageously and agreeably in that science, from any one head. I confess in some places I was forced to read twice; I believe I told you before what the Duke of D faid to me on that occa

fion; how a judge here who knows you, told him, that on the first reading those essays, he was much pleased, but found fome lines a little dark: On the second, most of them cleared up, and his pleasure increased: On the third, he had no doubt remaining, and then he admired the whole *."

THE subject of this Essay is a vindication of providence, in which the poet proposes * Letters, vol. IX. pag. 140.

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to prove, that of all possible systems, infinite wisdom has formed the best: That in such a system, coherence, union, fubordination, are necessary; and if so, that appearances of evil, both moral and natural, are also necessary and unavoidable; That the seeming defects and blemishes in the universe, conspire to its general beauty; That as all parts in an animal are not eyes, and as in a city, comedy, or picture, all ranks, characters, and colours, are not equal or alike; even so, excesses, and contrary qualities, contribute to the proportion and harmony of the universal system; That it is not strange, that we should not be able to discover perfection and order in every instance; because, in an infinity of things mutually relative, a mind which fees not infinitely, can see nothing fully. This doctrine was inculcated by Plato and the Stoics, but more amply and particularly by the later Platonists, and by Antoninus and Simplicius. In illustrating his subject, POPE has been much more deeply indebted to the Theodiceé of Leibnitz, to Arch

bishop bishop King's Origin of Evil, and to the Moralists of Lord Shaftesbury, than to the philosophers abovementioned. The late Lord Bathurst repeatedly assured me, that he had read the whole scheme of the Essay on Man, in the hand-writing of Bolingbroke, and drawn up in a series of propofitions, which POPE was to verfify and illustrate. In doing which, our poet, it must be confefsed, left several passages fo expressed, as to be favourable to fatalism and neceffity, notwithstanding all the pains that can be taken, and the turns that can be given to those passages, to place them on the fide of religion, and make them coincide with the fundamental doctrines of revelation.

1. Awake *, my St. John! leave all meaner things
To low ambition, and the pride of kings;
Let us (fince life can little more fupply
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.

* Ben Jonson begins a poem thus,

EPIST. I. V. 1.

Wake! friend, from forth thy lethargy

THIS opening is awful, and commands the attention of the reader. The word awake has peculiar force, and obliquely alludes to his noble friend's leaving his political, for philosophical pursuits. May I venture to observe, that the metaphors in the succeeding lines, drawn from the field sports of setting and shooting, seem below the dignity of the subject; especially,

Eve nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies,
And CATCH the manners living as they RISE.

2. But vindicate the ways of God to man. This line is taken from Milton; And justify the ways of God to man *.

POPE seems to have hinted, by this allufion to the Paradise Lost, that he intended his poem for a defence of providence, as well as Milton: but he took a very different method in pursuing that end; and imagined that the goodness and justice of the Deity might be defended, without hav

* Paradife Loft, b. i. ver. 26.

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