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:—
'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 are all tied together by relations and connexions, gradations, and dependencies." The verbal coincidence is here as marked as the coincidence in argument. Warton refers to an eloquent passage in Shaftesbury, which contains a similar thought; but one can hardly doubt that Bolingbroke was in this case the immediate source. A
