45

Abstract what others feel, what others think,
All pleasures sicken, and all glories sink:
Each has his share; and who would more obtain,
Shall find the pleasure pays not half the pain.
Order is Heaven's first law; and this confess'd,
Some are, and must be, greater than the rest,
More rich, more wise; but who infers from hence
That such are happier, shocks all common sense.
Heaven to mankind impartial we confess,
If all are equal in their happiness:

50

55

But mutual wants this happiness increase;
All Nature's difference keeps all Nature's peace.
Condition, circumstance is not the thing;
Bliss is the same in subject or in king;
In who obtain defence, or who defend;
In him who is, or him who finds a friend:
Heaven breathes through every member of the whole
One common blessing, as one common soul:
But Fortune's gifts if each alike possess'd,
And each were equal, must not all contest?

60

50 Some are, and must be, greater than the rest. While the common conception that happiness depends on the gifts of fortune or condition in society is justly controverted, and it is here shown in language of not less truth than beauty, that the very difference of gifts and conditions is a source of happiness to society;-Montesquieu, d'Alembert, and Voltaire alike disclaim the idea that equality of ranks is profitable, or even possible, for any continuance. Voltaire says, You are not, by the term equality, to understand that absurd and impossible equality, by which the master and the servant, the magistrate and the artificer, the plaintiff and the judge, are confounded together; but that equality by which the subject depends only on the laws.' But this doctrine shows only that even Voltaire was not ripe enough for the spirit of the age:' five and twenty years after, he would have been brought to the scaffold for this high-treason to republicanism.

65

If then to all men happiness was meant,
God in externals could not place content.
Fortune her gifts may variously dispose,
And these be happy call'd, unhappy those;
But Heaven's just balance equal will appear,
While those are placed in hope, and these in fear:
Not present good or ill, the joy or curse;
But future views of better or of worse.

O sons of earth! attempt ye still to rise,
By mountains piled on mountains, to the skies?
Heaven still with laughter the vain toil surveys,
And buries madmen in the heaps they raise.

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76

Know, all the good that individuals find, Or God and nature meant to mere mankind, Reason's whole pleasure, all the joys of sense, Lie in three words,-health, peace, and compe

tence.

80

But health consists with temperance alone;
And peace, O Virtue! peace is all thy own.
The good or bad the gifts of Fortune gain;
But these less taste them, as they worse obtain.
Say, in pursuit of profit or delight,
Who risk the most, that take wrong means, or
right?

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90

Of vice or virtue, whether bless'd or cursed,
Which meets contempt, or which compassion first?
Count all the advantage prosperous Vice attains,
"Tis but what Virtue flies from and disdains:
And grant the bad what happiness they would,
One they must want, which is, to pass for good.
O, blind to truth, and God's whole scheme

below,

Who fancy bliss to vice, to virtue wo!

Who sees and follows that great scheme the best,
Best knows the blessing, and will most be bless'd:
But fools the good alone unhappy call,

For ills or accidents that chance to all.
See Falkland dies, the virtuous and the just!
See godlike Turenne prostrate on the dust!
See Sidney bleeds amid the martial strife!
Was this their virtue or contempt of life?

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99 See Falkland dies. The celebrated Lucius Cary, viscount Falkland. His life was a scene of striking change, beginning with alienation from his family and country, and closing with the highest confidence of his king; beginning with retirement and controversy, and closing in the busiest activity of public affairs; beginning with strong opposition to the prerogative, and closing with a noble death in the field for the royal cause. He was killed at the battle of Newbury, when only 34. But his portraits represent lord Falkland as neither the pale and profound student nor the brilliant and vivid chevalier, each of which characters he bore at different periods of his brief existence: his physiognomy is calm and full, with a large quiet eye, and a cheek slightly tinged with color; the countenance of a quiet mind, which the fierce and wild exigencies of the time could alone rouse into the display of its ardor or its ability.

100 See godlike Turenne. The man who, of all the warriors ever produced by France, has possessed the highest rank of character. Equalled, and even surpassed, in military genius, in the scale of his campaigns, and the extent of his successes, no soldier of his country has ever reached him in the fame of personal dignity of mind. Yet with what shades must the picture of military virtue be qualified, when we see that even Turenne, in the havoc of the unfortunate Palatines, executed one of the most abhorred and cruel acts of one of the most remorseless tyrants of Europe! He was killed in a reconnoitring party near Salzbach, July 27, 1676; and his death threw all France into consternation.

101 See Sidney bleeds. The panegyric of Sidney has been disputed in modern times: but the qualities must have been of no common order, whose fame had spread through Europe almost in boyhood; who at the age of twenty-two was selected

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Say, was it virtue, more though Heaven ne'er

gave,

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Lamented Digby! sunk thee to the grave?
Tell me,
if virtue made the son expire,
Why, full of days and honor, lives the sire?
Why drew Marseilles' good bishop purer breath,
When Nature sicken'd, and each gale was death?
Or why so long, in life if long can be,

Lent Heaven a parent to the poor and me? 110
What makes all physical or moral ill?

There deviates nature, and here wanders will.
God sends not ill, if rightly understood;
Or partial ill is universal good,

by the politic Elizabeth as her ambassador at the most important court of the continent, the court of the emperor Rodolph; and who, on the mere repute of his valor and virtues, at the age of thirty was proposed for the crown of Poland. He was killed at thirty-two by a musket-shot, in command of the British cavalry, near Zutphen, September 22, 1586.

107 Why drew Marseilles' good bishop purer breath. In the great plague of Marseilles in 1720, when the leading authori. ties and inhabitants had fled, de Belzance the bishop remained, and distinguished himself by his honorable and humane activity. In the absence of all other powers, he constituted the magistrate, the chief physician, and the chief spiritual guide of the city. The sacramental nature of the rites of the Roman catholic church makes the attendance of the clergy an absolute essential to the death-bed; but the virtues of de Belzance belonged not the less to the individual, and deserved not the less praise heaped on him by his contemporaries. Two years after, the king, Louis XV, offered to translate him to the more important bishopric of Laon: he refused the offer, saying, that he could not leave a people so dear to him by their sufferings. The king allowed the plea, but conferred on him some feudal privileges, and the pope sent him the pallium peculiar to archbishops: but his chief honor was in the attachment of his people, and his reputation throughout Europe. He lived for thirty-five years after this period, dying in 1755.

Or change admits, or nature lets it fall;
Short, and but rare, till man improved it all.
We just as wisely might of Heaven complain
That righteous Abel was destroy'd by Cain,
As that the virtuous son is ill at ease

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120

When his lewd father gave the dire disease. Think we, like some weak prince, the Eternal Cause Prone for his favorites to reverse his laws?

125

Shall burning Etna, if a sage requires, Forget to thunder, and recall her fires? On air or sea new motions be impress'd, O blameless Bethel ! to relieve thy breast? When the loose mountain trembles from on high, Shall gravitation cease if you go by? Or some old temple, nodding to its fall,

For Chartres' head reserve the hanging wall? 130

123 Shall burning Etna, if a sage requires. Warburton asserts that this alludes to the fate of the two great naturalists, Empedocles and Pliny, who both perished by too near an approach to Etna and Vesuvius, while they were exploring the cause of their eruptions.' This is an example of Warburton's rash and rambling manner. If the graver history of Empedocles were to be the guide, that philosopher died in Greece; if the traditional, he threw himself into Etna, to be thought a god: Warburton takes neither, but invents a third. The text makes no mention of Vesuvius, at whose base Pliny died; and died, not in exploring the mountain as a naturalist, but in protecting the population as a Roman officer. Besides, neither of them was employed in bidding the volcano Forget to thunder, and recall her fires.' The whole allusion means nothing more than the superiority of the wisdom and power of nature to the hasty suggestions of man.

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130 For Chartres' head. Colonel Chartres, an infamous proffigate, who after a long life of scandalous impunity, was at length hanged by a denial of justice.

130 The hanging wall. Warton here offensively carps at Eusebius, as weak enough to relate, from the testimonies of Irenæus and Polycarp, that the roof of the building, under