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TO THE

AUTHOR OF THE ESSAY ON MAN.

BY MR. SOMERVILE.

WAS ever Work to such perfection wrought!
How elegant the diction! pure the thought!
Not sparingly adorn'd with scatter'd rays,
But one bright beauty, one collected blaze!
So breaks the day upon the shades of night,
Enliv'ning all with one unbounded light.

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To humble man's proud heart thy great design: But who can read this wondrous work divine, So justly plann'd, and so politely writ,

And not be proud, and boast of human wit?

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Yet just to thee, and to thy precepts true,
Let us know man, and give to God his due ;
His image we, but mix'd with coarse allay;
Our happiness to love, adore, obey;

To praise him for each gracious boon bestow'd,
For this thy Work, for ev'ry lesser good;
With prostrate hearts before his throne to fall,
And own the great Creator all in all.

The Muse which should instruct now entertains
On trifling subjects, in enervate strains :

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Be it thy task to set the wand'rer right,
Point out her way in her aërial flight;
Her noble mein, her honours lost restore,
And bid her deeply think, and proudly soar :
Thy theme sublime and easy verse will prove
Her high descent, and mission from above.
Let others now translate: thy abler pen
Shall vindicate the ways of God to Men;
In Virtue's cause shall gloriously prevail,

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When the bench frowns in vain, and pulpits fail. 30 Made wise by thee, whose happy style conveys

The purest morals in in the softest lays,

As angels once, so now we mortals bold

Shall climb the ladder Jacob view'd of old;
Thy kind reforming Muse shall lead the way
To the bright regions of eternal day.

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AN ESSAY ON MAN.

EPISTLE I.

Of the Nature and State of Man with

respect to the Universe.

THE ARGUMENT.

OF Man in the abstract. I. That we can judge only with regard to our own system, being ignorant of the relations of systems and things, v. 17, &c. II. That man is not to be deemed imperfect, but a being suited to his place and rank in the creation, agreeable to the general order of things, and conformable to ends and relations to him unknown, v. 35, &c. III. That it is partly upon his ignorance of future events, and partly upon the hope of a future state, that all his happiness in the present depends, v. 77, &c. IV. The pride of aiming at more knowledge, and pretending to more perfection, the cause of Man's error and misery. The impiety of putting himself in the place of God, and judging of the fitness or unfitness, perfection or imperfection; justice or injustice, of his dispensations, v. 115, &c. V. The absurdity of conceiting

himself the final cause of the creation, or expecting that perfection in the moral world which is not in the natural, v. 131, &c. VI. The unreasonableness of his complaints against Providence, while, on the one hand, he demands the perfections of the angels, and, on the other, the bodily qualifications of the brutes; though to possess any of the sensitive faculties in a higher degree would render him miserable, v. 173, &c. VII. That throughout the whole visible world an universal order and gradation in the sensual and mental faculties is observed, which causes a subordination of creature to creature, and of all creatures to Man. The gradations of sense, instinct, thought, reflection, reason; that reason alone countervails all the other faculties, v. 207. VIII. How much further this order and subordination of living creatures may extend above and below us; were any part of which broken, not that part only, but the whole connected creation must be destroyed, v. 233. IX. The extravagance, madness, and pride, of such a desire, v. 259. X. The consequence of all, the absolute submission due to Providence, both as to our present and future state, v. 281, &c. to the end.

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