ar to represent what he actually set down for
Pope's guidance. They are professedly addressed to Pope. "I write," he
says (fragment 65), "to you and for you, and you would think yourself
little obliged to me if I took the pains of explaining in prose what you
would not think it necessary to explain in verse,"--that is, the
free-will puzzle. The manuscripts seen by Mallet may probably have been
a commonplace book in which Bolingbroke had set down some of these
fragments, by way of instructing Pope, and preparing for his own more
systematic work. No reader of the fragments can, I think, doubt as to
the immediate source of Pope's inspiration. Most of the ideas expressed
were the common property of many contemporary writers, but Pope accepts
the particular modification presented by Bolingbroke.[21] Pope's
manipulation of these materials causes much of the Essay on Man to
resemble (as Mr. Pattison puts it) an exquisite mosaic work. A detailed
examination of his mode of transmutation would be a curious study in the
technical secrets of literary execution. A specimen or two will
sufficiently indicate the general character of Pope's method of
constructing his essay.

The forty-third fragment of Bolingbroke is virtually a prose version of
much of Pope's poetry. A few phrases will exhibit the relation:--

Through worlds unnumber'd though the God be known,
'Tis ours to _trace Him only in our own_.
He who through vast immensity can pierce,
See worlds on worlds _compose one universe_,
Observe how _system into system runs_,
What other planets circle other suns,
What varied being peoples every star,
May tell why Heaven has made us what we are.
But of this frame the bearings and _the ties_,
The strong _connexions_, nice _dependencies_,
_Gradations_ just, has thy pervading soul
Looked through, or can a part contain the whole?

"The universe," I quote only a few phrases from Bolingbroke, "is an
immense aggregate of systems. Every one of these, _if we may judge by
our own_, contains several, and every one of these again, _if we may
judge by our own_, is made up of a multitude of different modes of
being, animated and inanimated, thinking and unthinking ... but all
concurring in one common system.... Just so it is with respect to the
various systems and _systems of systems that compose the universe_. As
distant as they are, and as different as we may imagine them to be, they