PREFACE

THIS edition of Pope's Essay on Man is intended to

supply the student with a readable text of one of the chief masterpieces of eighteenth-century poetry, and with a short commentary and notes, which may serve to elucidate the poem without becoming a formidable addition to it. The editor's obligations to previous editions are recorded at the end of the introduction.

GRETTON,

NORTHANTS.
June 1913.

A. H. T.

291017

INTRODUCTION

THE four epistles which constitute the Essay on Man were published separately at short intervals between February 1733 and January 1734, the first three anonymously, the last under the author's name. They were intended by Pope to form the first book of a versified system of philosophy, and 'to be to the whole work,' as he wrote in 1730, 'what a scale is to a book of maps.' The system, originally planned in four books, was limited in its later form to two books of Ethic Epistles. Of these the completed Essay on Man was the first the five Moral Essays are portions of the second, the general subject of which was characterised by Pope as the Use of Things. Pope's habit of desultory composition, of writing isolated passages and connecting them as his fancy prompted him, was fatal to the completion of his design. The Moral Essays, which appeared under Pope's own name, are separate poems, published (with the exception of the fifth, which was written in 1715 and published in 1720) between 1731 and 1735, the period which covers the composition and publication of the Essay on Man. Their pretensions to philosophy are subordinate to their character as satire, and in this respect they offer a striking contrast to Pope's serious pursuit of his argument in the

Essay. Pope described them, or rather the contemplated whole of which they were to form a part, as 'a system of ethics in the Horatian way.' In the Essay, on the other hand, he changed the 'gaieties of Horace' for the 'grave march of Lucretius.' It is probable that he had some doubt of the reception which would be accorded to the more serious portion of his scheme. This accounts for the care with which he preserved the anonymity of the first three epistles of the Essay on Man. His contemporary publication of the Epistle to Lord Cobham (1733), with its more familiar treatment of human nature and its allusions to living persons, may have had the effect of concealing the fact, obvious though it may seem to our own day, that its acknowledged author was identical with the anonymous philosopher of the Essay.

Pope's general scheme was due to the advice of lord Bolingbroke, with whom he had been in close correspondence since 1724. Bolingbroke, deprived of any active participation in state affairs, had turned his versatile intelligence to the study of philosophy. His fragments of philosophical writing were not made public until some years after the Essay on Man had appeared. Their close correspondence of thought and of actual phrase with Pope's poem has been responsible for the theory that Bolingbroke plagiarised from Pope. The reverse, however, is the truth. Bolingbroke used Pope's genius to popularise his own ideas upon the government of the world and the relative happiness of man. Pope, in a letter to Spence, records that Bolingbroke supplied him with seven or eight sheets of notes,