Poor Cornus sees his frantic wife elope, And curses wit, and poetry, and Pope.

25

Friend to my life! (which did not you prolong,

The world had wanted many an idle song),
What drop or nostrum can this plague remove?
Or which must end me, a fool's wrath or love? 30
A dire dilemma! either way I'm sped,8

If foes, they write, if friends, they read me dead.
Seized and tied down to judge, how wretched I!
Who can't be silent, and who will not lie:
To laugh, were want of goodness and of grace, 35
And to be grave, exceeds all power of face.
I sit with sad civility, I read

With honest anguish, and an aching head;
And drop at last, but in unwilling ears,
This saving counsel-"Keep your piece nine
years.'

40

"Nine years!" cried he, who, high in Drury Lane,9

Lulled by soft zephyrs through the broken pane,

Rhymes ere he wakes, and prints before Term ends, 10

Obliged by hunger and request of friends:

"The piece you think is incorrect? why take it;

45

At last he whispers, "Do; and we go snacks." Glad of a quarrel, straight I clap the door: "Sir, let me see your works and you no more."

109

One dedicates in high heroic prose, And ridicules beyond a hundred foes: One from all Grub Street14 will my fame defend, And, more abusive, calls himself my friend. This prints my letters, that expects a bribe, And others roar aloud, "Subscribe, subscribe!" There are who to my person pay their court: I cough like Horace, and, though lean, am short.

117

Ammon's great son15 one shoulder had too
high,-
Such Ovid's nose, and, "sir, you have an eye."
Go on, obliging creatures, make me see
All that disgraced my betters met in me. 120
Say, for my comfort, languishing in bed,
"Just so immortal Marole held his head:"
And, when I die, be sure you let me know
Great Homer died three thousand years ago.

Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipped me in ink, my parents', or my own? 126 As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,

I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.
I left no calling for this idle trade,
No duty broke, no father disobeyed:

130

The muse but served to ease some friend, not wife,

133

To help me through this long disease, my life;
To second, Arbuthnot! thy art and care,
And teach the being you preserved to
bear. . .

Soft were my numbers; who could take offence

147

While pure description held the place of sense?

Did some more sober critic come abroad- 157
If wrong, I smiled; if right, I kissed the rod.
Pains, reading, study, are their just pretence,
And all they want is spirit, taste, and sense. 160
Commas and points they set exactly right,
And 't were a sin to rob them of their mite.

Were others angry-I excused them too; 173 Well might they rage, I gave them but their due.

A man's true merit 'tis not hard to find; 175 But each man's secret standard in his mind,

13 Bernard Lintot, a leading bookseller, whom Pope attacks in the Dunciad.

14 A street frequented by obscure authors.

15 Alexander the Great, who boasted that he was son of the Egyptian god Ammon. 16 Virgil.

197

True genius kindles, and fair fame inspires;
Blest with each talent, and each art to please,
And born to write, converse, and live with ease:
Should such a man, too fond to rule alone,
Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,
View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,
And hate for arts that caused himself to rise; 200
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike,
Alike reserved to blame, or to commend,
A timorous foe, and a suspicious friend;
Dreading e'en fools, by flatterers besieged,
And so obliging, that he ne'er obliged;
Like Cato, give his little senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause;
While wits and templars every sentence raise,
And wonder with a foolish face of praise-
Who but must laugh, if such a man there be?
Who would not weep, if Atticus where he?

"IN VAIN, IN VAIN"

205

210

17 i. e., Ambrose Philips (1675?-1749), a poet, and one of Pope's many enemies.

18 Nahum Tate (1652-1715), succeeded Shadwell' as poet laureate in 1692.

19 This concluding passage refers to Addison.

1 Pope made many enemies, and while the Dunciad, or epic of Dunces, is one of the most famous and brilliant of English satires, it is also a malicious and too often unworthy attack upon Pope's literary contemporaries. In the first three books (1728), the prize for dullness is given to Lewis Theobald, an early editor of Shakespeare, but in a fourth book, added in 1742, Pope's anger led him to depose Theobald and put Colley Cibber in his place.

640

As one by one, at dread Medea's strain, 635
The sick'ning stars fade off th’ethereal plain;
As Argus' eyes by Hermes' wand opprest,
Clos'd one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled,
Mountains of Casuistry heap'd o'er her head!
Philosophy, that lean'd on Heav'n before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
Physic of Metaphysic begs defense,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!

645

In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.

650

For public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor'd;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall 655
And universal Darkness buries All!

Try what the open, what the covert yield; 10
The latent tracts, the giddy heights, explore,
Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar;
Eye Nature's walks, shoot Folly as it flies,
And catch the manners living as they rise;
Laugh where we must, be candid where we can;
But vindicate the ways of God to man.

16

Say first, of God above or man below, What can we reason but from what we know? Of man, what see we but his station here, From which to reason, or to which refer?" Through worlds unnumbered though the God be known,

"Tis ours to trace Him only in our own. He, who through vast immensity can pierce, See worlds on worlds compose one universe,

20

1 The Essay on Man is a versified treatise in four Epistles, on the moral order of the world. The argument is supposed to have been supplied to Pope by his friend Lord Bolingbroke, to whom the work is addressed.

And now a bubble burst, and now a world. 90 Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;

Wait the great teacher Death, and God adore.
What future bliss He gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be, blest.
The soul, uneasy, and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

95

Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutored mind Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind; 100 His soul proud science never taught to stray Far as the solar walk or milky way;

Yet simple Nature to his hope has given, Behind the cloud-topped hill, an humbler heaven;

Some safer world in depth of woods embraced, Some happier island in the watery waste. 106 Where slaves once more their native land behold,

No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.

To be, contents his natural desire;
He asks no angel's wings, no seraph's fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.

110

Go, wiser thou! and in thy scale of sense, Weigh thy opinion against Providence; Call imperfection what thou fanciest such, 115 Say, Here He gives too little, there too much! Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust, Yet cry, If man's unhappy, God's unjust; If man alone engross not Heaven's high care, Alone made perfect here, immortal there: 120 Snatch from His hand the balance and the rod, Re-judge His justice, be the god of God. In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies; All quit their sphere and rush into the skies! Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes, Men would be angels, angels would be gods. Aspiring to be gods if angels fell, Aspiring to be angels men rebel: And who but wishes to invert the laws Of order, sins against the Eternal Cause.

125

130

From pride, from pride our very reasoning springs;

Account for moral, as for natural things: Why charge we Heaven in those, in these acquit?

In both to reason right is to submit.

Better for us, perhaps, it might appear,
Were there all harmony, all virtue here;
That never air or ocean felt the wind;
That never passion discomposed the mind.
But all subsists by elemental strife;
And passions are the elements of life.
The general order, since the whole began,
Is kept in nature, and is kept in man.

165

170

To want the strength of bulls, the fur of bears.
Made for his use, all creatures if he call,
Say what their use, had he the powers of all:
Nature to these without profusion kind,
The proper organs, proper powers assigned; 180
Each seeming want compensated of course,
Here with degrees of swiftness, there of force:
All in exact proportion to the state;
Nothing to add, and nothing to abate:
Each beast, each insect happy in its own:
Is Heaven unkind to man, and man alone?

2 Cæsar Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI.

a monster of wickedness.

3 A well-known conspirator.
Alexander the Great. Cf. p. 305, n. 15.

185

He was

Shall he alone, whom rational we call,
Be pleased with nothing, if not blessed with all?
The bliss of man (could pride that blessing
find),

190

Is not to act or think beyond mankind;
No powers of body or of soul to share,
But what his nature and his state can bear.
Why has not man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, man is not a fly.
Say what the use, were finer optics given,
To inspect a mite, not comprehend the heaven?
Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o'er,
To smart and agonize at every pore?
Or quick effluvia darting through the brain,
Die of a rose in aromatic pain?

195

200

If Nature thundered in his opening ears,
And stunned him with the music of the spheres,
How would he wish that Heaven had left him
still

The whispering zephyr and the purling rill!
Who finds not Providence all good and wise, 205
Alike in what it gives, and what denies?

213

Far as creation's ample range extends, The scale of sensual, mental powers ascends. Mark how it mounts to man's imperial race, From the green myriads in the peopled grass; What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme, The mole's dim curtain, and the lynx's beam: Of smell, the headlong lioness between, And hound sagacious on the tainted green: Of hearing, from the life that fills the flood, 215 To that which warbles through the vernal wood! The spider's touch how exquisitely fine! Feels at each thread, and lives along the line: In the nice bee, what sense so subtly true From poisonous herbs extracts the healing dew? How instinct varies in the groveling swine, 221 Compared, half-reasoning elephant, with thine! "Twixt that and reason, what a nice barrier! Forever separate, yet for ever near! Remembrance and reflection, how allied; 225 What thin partitions sense from thought divide; And middle natures, how they long to join, Yet never pass the insuperable line! Without this just gradation, could they be Subjected, these to those, or all to thee? The powers of all subdued by thee alone, Is not thy reason all these powers in one?

230

See, through this air, this ocean, ard this earth,

235

All matter quick, and bursting into birth.
Above, how high progressive life may go!
Around, how wide! how deep extend below!
Vast chain of being! which from God began,
Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,
Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see,
No glass can reach; from infinite to thee,
Froin thee to nothing. On superior powers
Were we to press, inferior might on ours:
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale's de-
stroyed:

240

From Nature's chain whatever link you strike, Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.

247

And if each system in gradation roll Alike essential to the amazing whole, The least confusion but in one, not all That system only, but the whole must fall. 250 Let earth unbalanced from her orbit fly, Planets and suns run lawless through the sky; Let ruling angels from their spheres be hurled, Being on being wrecked, and world on world; Heaven's whole foundations to their center nod, And Nature tremble to the throne of God! 256 All this dread order break-for whom? for thee? Vile worm!-Oh! madness! pride! impiety!

260

What if the foot, ordained the dust to tread, Or hand, to toil, aspired to be the head? What if the head, the eye, or car repined To serve mere engines to the ruling mind? Just as absurd for any part to claim To be another in this general frame;

Just as absurd to mourn the tasks or pains 265 The great directing Mind of all ordains.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul; That, changed through all, and yet in all the

same,

Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame, 270
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent;
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
As full, as perfect in a hair as heart;
As full, as perfect in vile man that mourns,
As the rapt seraph that adores and burns:
To Him no high, no low, no great, no small;
He fills, He bounds, connects, and equals all. 280

276

Who with his tongue hath armies routed, 5
Makes ev'n his real courage doubted.
But flattery never seems absurd;
The flatter'd always take your word:
Impossibilities seem just:

They take the strongest praise on trust. 10
Hyperboles, though ne'er so great,
Will still come short of self-conceit.

So very like a Painter drew,
That every eye the picture knew;
He hit complexion, feature, air,
So just, the life itself was there.
No flattery with his colours laid,
To bloom restor'd the faded maid;
He gave each muscle all its strength;
The mouth, the chin, the nose's length;
His honest pencil touch'd with truth,
And mark'd the date of age and youth.

He lost his friends, his practice fail'd;
Truth should not always be reveal'd;
In dusty piles his pictures lay,
For no one sent the second pay.
Two bustos, fraught with every grace,
A Venus' and Apollo's face,
He plac'd in view; resolv'd to please,
Who ever sat he drew from these,
From these corrected every feature,
And spirited each awkward creature.
All things were set; the hour was come,
His palette ready o'er his thumb;
My Lord appear'd; and, seated right,
In proper attitude and light,

The Painter look'd, he sketch'd the piece,
Then dipt his pencil, talk'd of Greece,
Of Titian's tints, of Guido's air;
"Those eyes, my Lord, the spirit there,
Might well a Raphael's hand require,
To give them all the native fire;
The features, fraught with sense and wit,
You'll grant are very hard to hit:
But yet with patience you shall view,
As much as paint and art can do."

Observe the work. My Lord replied,
"Till now I thought my mouth was wide;
Besides, my nose is somewhat long;
Dear, sir, for me, 'tis far too young!"

15

20

20

25

30

35

40

45

Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.

50

All nature is but art unknown to thee;

All chance, direction which thou cast not see; All discord, harmony not understood;

"Oh! pardon me, (the artist cried)

In this we Painters must decide.

291

All partial evil, universal good;

The piece ev'n common eyes must strike, I warrant it extremely like."

55

And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,

One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

John Eay

1688-1732

FABLE XVIII

THE PAINTER WHO PLEASED NOBODY AND

EVERYBODY

(From Fables, 1727)

Lest men suspect your tale untrue,
Keep probability in view.

The traveller leaping o'er those bounds,
The credit of his book confounds.

60

My Lord examin'd it a-new; No looking-glass seem'd half so true. A lady came, with borrow'd grace, He from his Venus form'd her face. Her lover prais'd the Painter's art; So like the picture in his heart! To every age some charm he lent; Ev'n beauties were almost content. Through all the town his art they prais'd; His custom grew, his price was rais'd. Had he the real likeness shown, Would any man the picture own? But when thus happily he wrought, Each found the likeness in his thought.

1 Busts.

65