lf-determination towards any paramount or abiding _principles_. Horace,
in a well-known passage, had congratulated himself upon this disease as
upon a trophy of philosophical emancipation:

Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri,
Quo me cunque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes:

which words Pope translates, and applies to himself in his
English adaptation of this epistle--

But ask not to what doctors I apply--
Sworn to no master, of no sect am I.
As drives the storm, at any door I knock;
And house with Montaigne now, and now with Locke.

That is, neither one poet nor the other having, as regarded philosophy,
any internal principle of gravitation or determining impulse to draw him
in one direction rather than another, was left to the random control of
momentary taste, accident, or caprice; and this indetermination of pure,
unballasted levity both Pope and Horace mistook for a special privilege
of philosophic strength. Others, it seems, were chained and coerced by
certain fixed aspects of truth, and their efforts were over-ruled
accordingly in one uniform line of direction. But _they_, the two
brilliant poets, fluttered on butterfly wings to the right and the left,
obeying no guidance but that of some instant and fugitive sensibility to
some momentary phasis of beauty. In this dream of drunken eclecticism,
and in the original possibility of such an eclecticism, lay the ground
of that enormous falsehood which Pope practised from youth to age. An
eclectic philosopher already, in the very title which he assumes,
proclaims his self-complacency in the large liberty of error purchased
by the renunciation of all controlling principles. Having served the
towing-line which connected him with any external force of guiding and
compulsory truth, he is free to go astray in any one of ten thousand
false radiations from the true centre of rest. By his own choice he is
wandering in a forest all but pathless,

--ubi passim
Pallantes error recto de tramite pellit;

and a forest not of sixty days' journey, like that old Hercynian
forest of Caesar's time, but a forest which sixty generations
have not availed to traverse or familiarise in any one direction....

_Here_ would be the most advantageous and _remunerative_ station to take
for one who should undertake a formal exposure of Pope's
hollow-heartedness; that is, it would most commensurately reward the pains
and difficulties of such an investigation.