idea in the seventh line, where the deity is suddenly transformed into a plant; from thence this metaphor of a vegetable is carried on distinctly through the eleven succeeding lines, till he suddenly returns to consider Happiness again as a person, in the eighteenth line;

And fled from monarchs, St. John, dwells with thee.

For, to fly, and, to dwell, cannot justly be predicated of the same subject, that immediately before was described as twining with laurels, and being reaped in harvests.

Of the numberless treatises that have been written on happiness, one of the most sensible is that of Fontenelle, in the third volume of his works. Our author's leading principle is, that happiness is attainable by all men ;

For, mourn our various portions as we please,
Equal is common sense, and common ease.

So Horace also in Epist. 18. B. 1.

Equum mi animum ipse parabo.

"But

"But Horace (says a penetrating observer on human life) was grossly mistaken: the thing for which he thought he stood in no need of Jupiter's assistance, was what he could least expect from his own ability. It is much more easy to get even riches and honours by one's industry, than a quiet and contented mind. If it be said, that riches and honours depend on a thousand things which we cannot dispose of at pleasure, and that therefore it is necessary to pray to God that he would turn them to our advantage, I answer, that the silence of the passions, and the tranquillity and ease of the mind, depend upon a thousand things that are not under our jurisdiction. The stomach, the spleen, the lymphatic vessels, the fibres of the brain, and a hundred other organs, whose seat and figure are yet unknown to the anatomists, produce in us many uneasinesses, jealousies, and vexations. Can we alter those organs? are they in our own power?"

47. When nature sicken'd, and each gale was death.*

This is a verse of a marvellous comprehension and expressiveness. The direfulness of this pestilence is more emphatically set forth in these few words, than in forty such odes as Sprat's on the Plague at Athens.*

48. What makes all physical or moral ill?.

There deviates Nature, and here wanders Will.f

POPE here accounts for the introduction of moral evil from the abuse of man's free will. This is the solid and scriptural solution of that grand and difficult question, which in vain hath puzzled and bewildered the speculatists of so many ages, ποθεν το κακον. Milton, in one of his smaller and neglected poems, has left us a sublime passage, founded on the Christian doctrine of the Fall, and of the preceding harmony of all things:

That

* Ταυθ' ότι μεν εςιν ισχυρα, κι σιβαρα, και αξιωματικα. He elsewhere commends a writer on account of his, TuxvoTNTOS, xaι σvortos. Dionys. Halicarnass. περι συνθέσεως. τμο xß.

+ Ver. 111.

49.

That we on earth, with undiscording voice,
May rightly answer that melodious noise,
As once we did, till disproportion'd Sin

Jarr'd against Nature's chime, and with harsh din
Broke the fair music that all creatures made

To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway'd
In perfect diapason, whilst they stood

In first obedience, and their state of good.*

A better wou'd you fix?

Then give Humility a coach and six.†

Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow;
The rest is all but leather or prunella.‡

Not one looks backward, onward still he goes,
Yet ne'er looks forward further than his nose.§

To sigh for ribbands, if thou art so silly,
Mark how they grace Lord Umbra or Sir Billy.[f

In a work of so serious and severe a cast, in a work of reasoning, in a work of theology, designed to explain the most interesting subject

that can employ the mind of man, surely such strokes of levity, of satire, of ridicule, however poignant and witty, are ill placed and disgusting, are violations of that propriety which POPE in general so strictly observed. Lucretius preserves throughout, the dignity he at first assumed; even his sarcasms and irony on the superstitious, have something august, and a noble haughtiness in them; as in particular, where he asks how it comes to pass that Jupiter sometimes strikes his own temples with his thunderbolts; whether he employs himself in casting them in the deserts for the sake of exercising his arm; and why he hurls them in places where he cannot strike the guilty ::

-----Tum fulmina mittat ; et ædes

Sæpe suas disturbet, et in deserta recedens

Sæviat, exercens telum, quod sæpe nocentes

Præterit, exanimatque indignos, inque merentes.*smal

He has turned the insult into a magnificent

inlage.

50. Heroes are much the same, the point's agreed, From Macedonia's madman to the Swede.

* Lib. ii. ver. 1100.