incere than those
addressed to this "guide, philosopher, and friend." He delighted to bask
in the sunshine of the great man's presence. Writing to Swift in 1728,
he (Pope) says that he is holding the pen "for my Lord Bolingbroke," who
is reading your letter between two haycocks, with his attention
occasionally distracted by a threatening shower. Bolingbroke is acting
the temperate recluse, having nothing for dinner but mutton-broth, beans
and bacon, and a barndoor fowl. Whilst his lordship is running after a
cart, Pope snatches a moment to tell how the day before this noble
farmer had engaged a painter for 200_l._ to give the correct
agricultural air to his country hall by ornamenting it with trophies of
spades, rakes, and prongs. Pope saw that the zeal for retirement was not
free from affectation, but he sat at the teacher's feet with profound
belief in the value of the lessons which flowed from his lips.

The connexion was to bear remarkable fruit. Under the direction of
Bolingbroke, Pope resolved to compose a great philosophical poem. "Does
Pope talk to you," says Bolingbroke to Swift in 1731, "of the noble work
which, at my instigation, he has begun in such a manner that he must be
convinced by this time I judged better of his talents than he did?" And
Bolingbroke proceeds to describe the Essay on Man, of which it seems
that three (out of four) epistles were now finished. The first of these
epistles appeared in 1733. Pope, being apparently nervous on his first
appearance as a philosopher, withheld his name. The other parts followed
in the course of 1733 and 1734, and the authorship was soon avowed. The
Essay on Man is Pope's most ambitious performance, and the one by which
he was best known beyond his own country. It has been frequently
translated, it was imitated both in France and Germany, and provoked a
controversy, not like others in Pope's history of the purely personal
kind.

The Essay on Man professes to be a theodicy. Pope, with an echo of the
Miltonic phrase, proposes to

Vindicate the ways of God to man.

He is thus attempting the greatest task to which poet or philosopher can
devote himself--the exhibition of an organic and harmonious view of the
universe. In a time when men's minds are dominated by a definite
religious creed, the poet may hope to achieve success in such an
undertaking without departing from his legitimate method. His vision
pierces to the world hidden from our senses, and realiz