See god-like TURENNE prostrate on the dust'!
See SIDNEY bleeds amid the martial strife 2!
Was this their Virtue, or Contempt of Life?
Say, was it Virtue, more tho' Heav'n ne'er gave,
Lamented DIGBY! sunk thee to the grave?
Tell me, if Virtue made the Son expire,
Why, full of days and honour, lives the Sire?
Why drew Marseille's good bishop purer breath,
When Nature sicken'd, and each gale was death"?
Or why so long (in life if long can be)
Lent Heav'n a parent to the poor and me?
What makes all physical or moral ill?
There deviates Nature, and here wanders Will.
God sends not ill; if rightly understood,
Or partial Ill is universal Good,

Or Change admits, or Nature lets it fall;
Short, and but rare, till Man improv'd it all.
We just as wisely might of Heav'n complain
That righteous Abel was destroy'd by Cain,
As that the virtuous son is ill at ease
When his lewd father gave the dire disease.
Think we, like some weak Prince, th' Eternal Cause
Prone for his fav'rites to reverse his laws?
Shall burning Etna, if a sage requires,
Forget to thunder, and recall her fires?
On air or sea new motions be imprest,

was appointed Secretary of State and fell, fight-
ing under the Royal Standard, in the battle of
Newbury, Sept. 20, 1643. It is of him that
Clarendon, in one of the most eloquent passages
of his History, speaks as of that incomparable
young man who in the brief span of life allotted
to him' (for he fell in his 34th year) had so much
dispatched the business of life, that the oldest
rarely attain to that immense knowledge, and the
youngest enter not the world with more inno-
cence. Waller, the most fastidious of English
poets, would have gladly welcomed Falkland
among their sacred order:

'Ah, noble friend! with what impatience all
That know thy worth, and know how prodigal
Of thy great soul thou art (longing to twist
Bays with that ivy which so early kissed
Thy youthful temples), with what horror we
Think of the blind events of war and thee!']

[Henry, Vicomte de Turenne, Marshal of France, after commanding the French armies in the latter part of the Thirty Years' War, raised his military fame to the highest pitch, without preserving it intact from the blot of barbarous conduct, in the Alsatian and Palatinate campaigns developed out of the peace of Westphalia. He was struck dead by a cannon-ball at Salzbach in Baden in 1675; and was buried among the Kings of France at St Denis.]

[Sir Philip Sidney, the author of the Arcadia, who was wounded to the death in the glorious but useless cavalry charge at Zutphen in 1586.]

3 [The Hon. Robert Digby, third son of Lord Digby, who died in 1724. See Epitaph vII. and Note.]

4 Marseille's good bishop.] M. de Belsance was made bishop of Marseilles in 1709. In the plague of that city, in the year 1720, he distinguished himself by his zeal and activity, being the pastor, the physician, and the magistrate of his flock, whilst that horrid calamity prevailed. [After receiving extraordinary distinctions in recognition of his services both from the Pope and King Louis XV.] He died in the year 1755.

Warton.

['I believe your prayers will do me more good than those of all the Prelates in both kingdoms, or any Prelates in Europe except the Bishop of Marseilles.' Swift to Pope, May 12, 1735.]

5 [Warton refers to Dryden's Miscellanies, v. 6.] 6 The mother of the author, a person of great piety and charity, died the year this poem was finished, viz. 1733. Warburton. [For Pope's relations to his mother, see Introductory Memoir.] 7 After v. 116, in the MS.

'Of ev'ry evil, since the world began,
The real source is not in God, but man.'
Warburton.

8 Shall burning Etna, &c.] Alluding to the fate of those two great Naturalists, Empedocles and Pliny, who both perished by too near an approach to Etna and Vesuvius, while they were exploring the cause of their eruptions.

Warburton.

Oh blameless Bethel1! to relieve thy breast?
When the loose mountain trembles from on high,
Shall gravitation cease, if you go by?

Or some old temple, nodding to its fall,
For Chartres' head reserve the hanging wall??

But still this world (so fitted for the knave)
Contents us not. A better shall we have?
A kingdom of the Just then let it be:
But first consider how those Just agree.
The good must merit God's peculiar care;

But who, but God, can tell us who they are?
One thinks on Calvin Heav'n's own spirit fell;
Another deems him instrument of hell;
If Calvin feel Heav'n's blessing, or its rod,
This cries there is, and that, there is no God.
What shocks one part will edify the rest,
Nor with one system can they all be blest.
The very best will variously incline,

130

135

140

And what rewards your Virtue, punish mine.
WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT.-This world, 'tis true,
Was made for Cæsar-but for Titus. too:

145

And which more blest? who chain'd his country, say,
Or he whose Virtue sigh'd to lose a day3?

"But sometimes Virtue starves, while Vice is fed."
What then? Is the reward of Virtue bread?
That, Vice may merit, 'tis the price of toil;
The knave deserves it, when he tills the soil,

150

The knave deserves it, when he tempts the main,

Where Folly fights for kings, or dives for gain.
The good man may be weak, be indolent;

155

Nor is his claim to plenty, but content.

But grant him Riches, your demand is o'er?

"No-shall the good want Health, the good want Pow'r?”

Add Health, and Pow'r, and ev'ry earthly thing,

"Why bounded Pow'r? why private? why no king?"
Nay, why external for internal giv'n?

160

Why is not Man a God, and Earth a Heav'n?
Who ask and reason thus, will scarce conceive
God gives enough, while he has more to give:
Immense the pow'r, immense were the demand;
Say, at what part of nature will they stand?

What nothing earthly gives, or can destroy,

1 Pope seems to hint at this passage in a letter written to Mr Bethel, soon after the death of his mother: 'I have now too much melancholy leisure, and no other care but to finish my Essay on Man. There will be in it but one line that will offend you (I fear), and yet I will not alter it or omit it, unless you come to town and prevent it. It is all a poor Poet can do, to bear testimony to the virtue he cannot reach.' Ruffhead. [Mr Hugh Bethell, a Yorkshire gentleman and one of Pope's intimate friends,

165

to whom the Imitation of the Second Satire of the Second Book of Horace is addressed. See note to this Imit.]

2 Eusebius is weak enough to relate, from the testimonies of Irenæus and Polycarp, that the roof of the building under which Cerinthus the heretic was bathing, providentially fell down and crushed him to death. Lib. 1. cap. 29. Warton. [For Pope's own sketch of the character of Chartres, see his note to Moral Essays, 111. 20.] 3 [Sueton. Titus, c. 8.]

The soul's calm sunshine, and the heart-felt joy,
Is Virtue's prize: A better would you fix?
Then give humility a coach and six,
Justice a Conq'ror's sword, or Truth a gown,
Or Public Spirit its great cure, a Crown.
Weak, foolish man! will Heav'n reward us there
With the same trash mad mortals wish for here?
The Boy and Man an individual makes1,
Yet sigh'st thou now for apples and for cakes?
Go, like the Indian2, in another life
Expect thy dog, thy bottle, and thy wife:
As well as dream such trifles are assign'd,
As toys and empires, for a god-like mind.
Rewards, that either would to Virtue bring
No joy, or be destructive of the thing:
How oft by these at sixty are undone
The Virtues of a saint at twenty-one!
To whom can Riches give Repute, or Trust,
Content, or Pleasure, but the Good and Just?
Judges and Senates have been bought for gold,
Esteem and Love were never to be sold.
Oh fool to think God hates the worthy mind,
The lover and the love of human-kind,

170

175

180

185

190

Whose life is healthful, and whose conscience clear,
Because he wants a thousand pounds a year.

Honour and shame from no Condition rise;
Act well your part, there all the honour lies.
Fortune in Men has some small diff'rence made,
One flaunts in rags, one flutters in brocade;
The cobbler apron'd, and the parson gown'd,
The friar hooded, and the monarch crown'd.

195

"What differ more (you cry) than crown and cowl?"
I'll tell you, friend! a wise man and a Fool.
You'll find, if once the monarch acts the monk,
Or, cobbler-like, the parson will be drunk,
Worth makes the man, and want of it, the fellow;
The rest is all but leather or prunella 3.

Stuck o'er with titles and hung round with strings,.
That thou may'st be by kings, or whores of kings.
Boast the pure blood of an illustrious race,
In quiet flow from Lucrece to Lucrece 5:
But by your fathers' worth if yours you rate,
Count me those only who were good and great.
Go! if your ancient, but ignoble blood

Has crept thro' scoundrels ever since the flood,
Go! and pretend your family is young;

[The Boy and Man, i.e. the conjunction of boy and man; hence the verb is properly in the singular.]

2Go, like the Indian, &c.] Alluding to the example of the Indian in Epist. I. v. 99. War

burton.

200

205

210

3 [prunella; because clergymen's gowns were often made of this kind of stuff.]

4 [That is here the demonstrative.]

5 These two lines are taken from Boileau (Sat. v. VV. 85-6). Warton. [Hence the French pronunciation of the name Lucrece.]

Nor own, your fathers have been fools so long.
What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards?
Alas! not all the blood of all the HOWARDS.

Look next on Greatness; say where Greatness lies?
"Where, but among the Heroes and the wise?"
Heroes are much the same, the point's agreed,
From Macedonia's madman to the Swede1;

The whole strange purpose of their lives, to find
Or make, an enemy of all mankind!
Not one looks backward, onward still he goes,
Yet ne'er looks forward farther than his nose.
No less alike the Politic and Wise;

All sly slow things, with circumspective eyes:
Men in their loose unguarded hours they take,
Not that themselves are wise, but others weak.
But grant that those can conquer, these can cheat;
'Tis phrase absurd to call a Villain Great:
Who wickedly is wise, or madly brave,
Is but the more a fool, the more a knave.
Who noble ends by noble means obtains,
Or failing, smiles in exile or in chains,
Like good Aurelius2 let him reign, or bleed
Like Socrates3, that Man is great indeed.

215

220

225

230

235

What's Fame? a fancy'd life in others' breath,

A thing beyond us, ev'n before our death.

Just what you hear, you have, and what's unknown

The same (my Lord) if Tully's, or your own.
All that we feel of it begins and ends

240

In the small circle of our foes or friends;

To all beside as much an empty shade
An Eugene living, as a Cæsar dead;

Alike or when, or where, they shone, or shine,
Or on the Rubicon, or on the Rhine.
A Wit's a feather, and a Chief a rod";

1 [It is of course only a shallow misconception of a great historical character which can view Alexander the Great as a madman, or (see ante, Ep. 1. v. 160) as the scourge of mankind. He was 'great,' says Thirlwall, 'not merely in the vast compass, and the persevering ardour, of his ambition: nor in the qualities by which he was enabled to gratify it, and to crowd so many memorable actions within so short a period: but in the course which his ambition took, in the collateral aims which ennobled and purified it, so that it almost grew into one with the highest of which man is capable, the desire of knowledge, and the love of good. In a word, great as one of the benefactors of his kind.' Warton justly observes that Charles XII. deserved not to be joined with him: Charles XII. tore out the leaf in which Boileau had censured Alexander.' Charles XII. was with admirable tact substituted by Johnson in his Vanity of Human Wishes for Juvenal's Hannibal to 'point the

245

moral' of the vanity of ambition. Voltaire's Histoire de Charles XII. had appeared in 1730.]

2 [Marcus Aurelius Antoninus reigned from 161 to 180 A. D. Whatever may have been the errors of judgment into which he was led by the 'unsuspecting goodness of his heart' (Gibbon), his character remains one of the purest and noblest in the history of the Empire of which he witnessed the first Decline. A comparison, says Merivale, 'might be drawn with unusual precision between the wise, the virtuous, the much-suffering Aurelius, and our own great and good King Alfred.']

3 Considering the manner in which Socrates was put to death, the word 'bleed' seems to be improperly used. Warton.

4 [Prince Eugene of Savoy, the commander of the Imperial armies in the war of the Spanish Succession, and the joint hero with Marlborough of Blenheim and Malplaquet.]

5 [i.e. a mere scourge, as was said of Attila.]

An honest Man's the noblest work of God1.
Fame but from death a villain's name can save,
As Justice tears his body from the grave;
When what t' oblivion better were resign'd,
Is hung on high, to poison half mankind.
All fame is foreign, but of true desert;

Plays round the, head, but comes not to the heart:

One self-approving hour whole years out-weighs

Of stupid starers, and of loud huzzas;

And more true joy Marcellus exil'd feels2,
Than Cæsar with a senate at his heels.
In Parts superior what advantage lies?
Tell (for You can) what is it to be wise?
'Tis but to know how little can be known;
To see all others' faults, and feel our own:
Condemn'd in bus'ness or in arts to drudge,
Without a second, or without a judge:

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 risk'd, and always ease:
Think, and if still the things thy envy call3,

Say, would'st thou be the Man to whom they fall?
To sigh for ribbands if thou art so silly,
Mark how they grace Lord Umbra1, or Sir Billy:
Is yellow dirt the passion of thy life?
Look but on Gripus, or on Gripus' wife5: