followed by others. I appeared immediately in the world, and found there was hardly a scurrilous tongue which had not been let loose on my subject; and that those persons, whom the Duke of Ormond and the Earl of Mar must influence, or might influence, were the loudest in defaming me.

Particular instances wherein I had failed were cited; and, as it was the fashion for every Jacobite to affect being in the secret, you might have found a multitude of vouchers to facts, which, if they had been true, could in the nature of them be known to very few persons.

This method, of beating down the reputation of a man by noise and impudence, imposed on the world at first, convinced people who were not acquainted with me, and staggered even my friends. But it ceased in a few days to have any effect against me. The malice was too gross to pass upon reflection. These stories died away almost as fast as they were published, for this very reason, because they were particular.

(From Letter to Sir W. Windham.)

A RELIGION OF HYPOCRISY

EVERY one has an undoubted right to think freely nay, it is the duty of every one to do so, as far as he has the necessary means and opportunities. This duty too is in no case so incumbent on him as in those that regard what I call the first philosophy. They who have neither means nor opportunities of this sort, must submit their opinions to authority; and to what authority can they resign themselves so properly, and so safely, as to that of the laws, and constitution of their country ? In general, nothing can be more absurd than to take opinions of the greatest moment, and such as concern us the most intimately, on trust. But there is no help against it in many particular cases. Things the most absurd in speculation become necessary in practice. Such is the human constitution, and reason excuses them on the account of this necessity. Reason does even a little more; and it is all she can do. She gives the best direction possible to the absurdity. Thus she directs those, who must believe because they cannot know, to believe in the laws of their country, and conform their opinions and practice to those of their ancestors, to those of

Coruncanius, of Scipio, of Scaevola, not to those of Zeno, of Cleanthes, of Chrysippus.

But now the same reason that gives this discretion to such men as these, will give a very contrary direction to those who have the means and opportunities the others want. Far from advising them to submit to this mental bondage, she will advise them to employ their whole industry, to exert the utmost freedom of thought, and to rest on no authority but her's, that is, their own. She will speak to them in the language of the Soufys, a sect of philosophers in Persia, that travellers have mentioned. "Doubt," say these wise and honest freethinkers, "is the key of knowledge. He who never doubts, never examines. He who never examines, discovers nothing. He who discovers nothing, is blind, and will remain so. If you find no reason to doubt concerning the opinions of your fathers, keep to them, they will be sufficient for you. If you find any reason to doubt concerning them, seek the truth quietly, but take care not to disturb the minds of other men."

Let us proceed agreeably to these maxims. Let us seek truth, but seek it quietly as well as freely. Let us not imagine, like some who are called freethinkers, that every man, who can think and judge for himself, as he has a right to do, has therefore a right of speaking, any more than of acting according to the full freedom of his thoughts. The freedom belongs to him as a rational creature. He lies under the restraint as a member of society.

If the religion we profess contained nothing more than articles of faith, and points of doctrine clearly revealed to us in the Gospel, we might be obliged to renounce our natural freedom of thought in favour of this supernatural authority. But since it is notorious that a certain order of men, who call themselves the Church, have been employed to make and propagate a theological system of theirs, which they call Christianity, from the days of the Apostles, and even from these days inclusively; it is our duty to examine, and analyse the whole, that we may distinguish what is Divine from what is human; adhere to the first implicitly, and ascribe to the last no more authority than the word of man deserves.

Such an examination is the more necessary to be undertaken by every one who is concerned for the truth of his religion, and for the honour of Christianity, because the first preachers of it were

not, and they who preach it still are not agreed about many of the most important points of their system; because the controversies raised by these men have banished union, peace, and charity out of the Christian world; and because some parts of the system savour so much of superstition and enthusiasm, that all the prejudices of education, and the whole weight of civil and ecclesiastical power can hardly keep them in credit. These considerations deserve the more attention, because nothing can be more true, than what Plutarch said of old, and my Lord Bacon has said since; one, that superstition, and the other, that vain controversies are principal causes of atheism.

I neither expect nor desire to see any public revision made of the present system of Christianity. I should fear an attempt to alter the established religion as much as they who have the most bigot attachment to it, and for reasons as good as theirs, though not entirely the same. I speak only of the duty of every private man to examine for himself, which would have an immediate good effect relatively to himself, and might have in time a good effect relatively to the public, since it would dispose the minds of men to a greater indifference about theological disputes, which are the disgrace of Christianity, and have been the plagues of the world. (From Letter to Mr. Pope.)

ALEXANDER POPE

[Alexander Pope was born in 1688 and died in 1744. He published essays in the Guardian in 1713, a Discourse on Pastoral Poetry in 1717; a Preface to the edition of Shakespeare which appeared in 1725; besides various satirical papers which were collected in the Miscellanies of himself and Swift, published in 1728. The so-called spurious Correspondence was published in 1735; the author's version appeared in 1737; to which a sequel was added in 1741. In 1742 he printed the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, the greater part of which, however, was the work of Arbuthnot, though the Introduction was written by Pope.]

POPE'S prose writings may be classified as essays, satirical miscellanies, and letters. In this arrangement his letters make much the largest part. He was the first Englishman who treated letter-writing as an art, and so far did he carry his practice, that those of his compositions, which might be expected to be most like conversation, are the very ones which show the clearest marks of study and reflection. The series of frauds which accompanied the publication of his correspondence in 1735 is now perfectly understood; but it is plain, both from the judgment of his friends and from his own confession, that, long before he thought of taking the public into his confidence, his letters were written for literary effect. "This letter," he writes to Swift, 28th November 1729, "like all mine, will be a rhapsody. It is many years ago since I wrote as a wit. How many occurrences or informations must one omit, if one determined to say nothing that one could not say prettily." "I find," says Swift, in answer to him, 26th February 1729-30, "you have been a writer of letters almost from your infancy; and by your own confession had schemes even then of epistolary fame." In fact to call anything that he ever wrote "a rhapsody," was a mere figure of speech. Whatever he produced, whether prose or verse, from the time when he began to "lisp in numbers" to the very last day of his life, was weighed, meditated, and corrected before it was submitted to the public,

or indeed even to his friends. A vein of fiction ran through his thoughts on all subjects. He was always on the watch for materials of composition within his daily experience. On one occasion he made the trivial domestic troubles of one of his female friends the basis of a romantic "elegy.". On other occasions he treated actual scenes, persons, and incidents which came under his notice as subjects for epistolary romances. Of this kind are his letters to the Duke of Buckingham and Lady M. W. Montagu describing Stanton Harcourt; the letter about the haymakers struck by lightning, copies of which were sent to Martha Blount, Fortescue, and Lord Bathurst; and the letter to the Earl of Burlington, describing a ride with Lintot to Oxford. Viewed as ideal compositions, the style of these letters, descriptive, humorous, or pathetic, is often admirable. But the charm of a

letter is strongest when it may be supposed to afford a real image of the writer's mind, a real record of external things. "When I sit down to write a letter," says Swift, "I never lean upon my elbow until I finish it." Pope, on the contrary, never seems in his letters to be off his guard for a moment: we feel sure that he is always adding to the objects he professes to be painting from nature, the touches required to complete a literary effect.

It is noticeable also that he varies his style according to the ideal which he imagines to be present in the mind of his correspondent. To Cromwell he writes in a vein welcome, as he supposes, to one who had lived with the "wits" of the Restoration; corresponding with Lady M. W. Montagu, a woman of the highest fashion, he uses the style of gallantry invented by Voiture; but when he is discoursing with a simple country squire like Caryll, who, he knows, will not judge him severely, he reflects and moralises just as the humour takes him. His best letters are those in which the habit of composition is softened by natural affection, or checked by intellectual respect for his correspondent. What he wrote to

Martha Blount, for example, as it was often dictated by his heart, is much better than the string of frigid conceits which he thought would be an acceptable offering to Lady M. W. Montagu; while his letters to Swift who, he was aware, could measure his genius as well as admire it, have much of the friendly confidence shown in his correspondence with Caryll, with less of cheap philosophy. Where circumstances favoured him he could write with admirable effect, as we see in his answer to Atterbury, who, after his father's death, had used persuasion with him to