me, before he was a peer,
Henry St. John; entered Parliament in 1701, acting with the
Tories; Secretary of War in 1704-08; Secretary of State in
1710-14; created Viscount Bolingbroke in 1714; opposed the
accession of the House of Hanover, and on the death of Queen
Anne in 1714, fled to France, entering the service of the
Pretender, by whom he was soon dismissed and then returned
to England; a friend of Pope and Swift, Pope's "Essay on
Man" being addrest to him.

I

OF THE SHORTNESS OF HUMAN LIFE

I think very differently from most men of the time we have to pass,
and the business we have to do, in this world. I think we have more of
one, and less of the other, than is commonly supposed. Our want of
time, and the shortness of human life, are some of the principal
commonplace complaints which we prefer against the established order
of things; they are the grumblings of the vulgar, and the pathetic
lamentations of the philosopher; but they are impertinent and impious
in both. The man of business despises the man of pleasure for
squandering his time away; the man of pleasure pities or laughs at the
man of business for the same thing; and yet both concur superciliously
and absurdly to find fault with the Supreme Being for having given
them so little time. The philosopher, who misspends it very often as
much as the others, joins in the same cry, and authorizes this
impiety. Theophrastus thought it extremely hard to die at ninety, and
to go out of the world when he had just learned how to live in it. His
master Aristotle found fault with nature for treating man in this
respect worse than several other animals; both very unphilosophically!
and I love Seneca the better for his quarrel with the Stagirite[6] on
this head.

We see, in so many instances, a just proportion of things, according
to their several relations to one another, that philosophy should lead
as to conclude this proportion preserved, even where we can not
discern it; instead of leading us to conclude that it is not preserved
where we do not discern it, or where we think that we see the
contrary. To conclude otherwise is shocking presumption. It is to
presume that the system of the universe would have been more wisely
contrived, if creatures of our low rank among intellectual natures had
been called to the councils of the Most High; or that the Creator
ought to mend His work by the advice of the creature. That