Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land?
All fear, none aid you, and few understand.'
Painful pre-eminence! yourself to view
Above life's weakness, and its comforts too."

Bring then these blessings to a strict account;
Make fair deductions; see to what they 'mount:
How much of other each is sure to cost;

How each for other oft is wholly lost;

How inconsistent greater goods with these;
How sometimes life is risked, and always ease.
Think, and if still the things thy envy call,'
Say would'st thou be the man to whom they fall?
To sigh for ribbons if thou art so silly,
Mark how they grace Lord Umbra, or Sir Billy.*

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.

1 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.

2 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 preeminence," is from Addison's Cato, Act iii. Sc. 5, where Cato applies the phrase to his own situation.

3 This line is inconsistent with ver. 261-2. A man who feels pain

26.5

270

275

fully 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.

4 "Call" for "call forth."

5 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,

Is yellow dirt the passion of thy life?
Look but on Gripus, or on Gripus' wife.'
If parts allure thee, think how Bacon shined,
The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind :'
Or ravished with the whistling of a name,'
See Cromwell, damned to everlasting fame!*
If all, united, thy ambition call,

From ancient story learn to scorn them all."

There, in the rich, the honoured, famed, and great,
See the false scale of happiness complete!

In hearts of kings, or arms of queens who lay,
How happy those to ruin, these betray!

6

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.

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

2 Oldham :

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

3 From Cowley, Translation of Virgil:

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

4 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 adhe

rents.

5 MS. :

VOL. II.-POETKY.

280

285

290

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.

6 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

G G

of

Mark by what wretched steps their glory grows,'
From dirt and sea-weed as proud Venice rose;
In each how guilt and greatness equal ran,'
And all that raised the hero sunk the man:"
Now Europe's laurel on their brows behold,
But stained with blood, or ill-exchanged for gold:
Then see them broke with toils, or sunk in ease,
Or infamous for plundered provinces.*

O wealth ill-fated! which no act of fame"
E'er taught to shine, or sanctified from shame!'

6

The charges were the calumnies of an infuriated faction. His military career while he was commander-inchief 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

295

300

loved his military reputation more. The poet, who denounced him as a man "stained with blood," and "infamous for plundered provin. ces," 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."

4 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.

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

• 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.

7 Dryden, Virg. Æn. iv. 250:

But called it marriage, by that specious

name

To veil the crime, and sanctify the shame.
-WAKEFIELD.

What greater bliss attends their close of life?
Some greedy minion,' or imperious wife,

The trophied arches, storied halls' invade,
And haunt their slumbers in the pompous shade.'
Alas! not dazzled with their noon-tide ray,

Compute the morn and ev'ning to the day;
The whole amount of that enormous fame,

A tale, that blends their glory with their shame!
Know then this truth, enough for man to know,
"Virtue alone is happiness below."

The only point where human bliss stands still,'
And tastes the good without the fall to ill;
Where only merit constant pay receives,
Is blessed in what it takes, and what it gives;'

805

310 That virtue only constitutes a happiness whose object is universal, and whose prospect eternal.

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 circum-
stances, which would contradict ver.
119, where he says that the "vir-
tuous son is ill at ease
"" when he
inherits a "dire disease" from his
profligate father.

5 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.

--

That the
perfection
of happiness.

The joy unequalled, if its end it gain,'
And if it lose, attended with no pain :'
Without satiety, though e'er so blessed,
And but more relished as the more distressed:
The broadest mirth' unfeeling folly wears,

Less pleasing far than virtue's very tears:"

Good, from each object, from each place acquired,

For ever exercised, yet never tired;"

Never elated, while one man's oppressed;
Never dejected, while another's blessed;
And where no wants, no wishes can remain,
Since but to wish more virtue is to gain."

See the sole bliss heav'n could on all bestow!
Which who but feels can taste, but thinks can know;

1 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 con-
scious of the loss. Lord Byron ex-
pressed the same idea in a letter,
Dec. 8, 1821: "Indisputably, the
firm believers in the gospel have a
great 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 reckon-
ing the sufferings to which christians
are constantly exposed through their
homage to christianity.

2 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.

345

320

325

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

4 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.

5 MS. :

Which not by starts, and from without
acquired,

Is all ways exercised, and never tired.
6 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 per-
petual conflict, and prolonged self-
denial?