Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope by Bolingbroke Henry St. John Viscount

Author:Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount [Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781717258243
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: CreateSpace Publishing
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

A LETTER TO ALEXANDER POPE.

Dear Sir,—Since you have begun, at my request, the work which I have wished long that you would undertake, it is but reasonable that I submit to the task you impose upon me. The mere compliance with anything you desire, is a pleasure to me. On the present occasion, however, this compliance is a little interested; and that I may not assume more merit with you than I really have, I will own that in performing this act of friendship—for such you are willing to esteem it—the purity of my motive is corrupted by some regard to my private utility. In short, I suspect you to be guilty of a very friendly fraud, and to mean my service whilst you seem to mean your own.

In leading me to discourse, as you have done often, and in pressing me to write, as you do now, on certain subjects, you may propose to draw me back to those trains of thought which are, above all others, worthy to employ the human mind: and I thank you for it. They have been often interrupted by the business and dissipations of the world, but they were never so more grievously to me, nor less usefully to the public, than since royal seduction prevailed on me to abandon the quiet and leisure of the retreat I had chosen abroad, and to neglect the example of Rutilius, for I might have imitated him in this at least, who fled further from his country when he was invited home.

You have begun your ethic epistles in a masterly manner. You have copied no other writer, nor will you, I think, be copied by any one. It is with genius as it is with beauty; there are a thousand pretty things that charm alike; but superior genius, like superior beauty, has always something particular, something that belongs to itself alone. It is always distinguishable, not only from those who have no claim to excellence, but even from those who excel, when any such there are.

I am pleased, you may be sure, to find your satire turn, in the very beginning of these epistles, against the principal cause—for such you know that I think it—of all the errors, all the contradictions, and all the disputes which have arisen among those who impose themselves on their fellow-creatures for great masters, and almost sole proprietors of a gift of God which is common to the whole species. This gift is reason; a faculty, or rather an aggregate of faculties, that is bestowed in different degrees; and not in the highest, certainly, on those who make the highest pretensions to it. Let your satire chastise, and, if it be possible, humble that pride, which is the fruitful parent of their vain curiosity and bold presumption; which renders them dogmatical in the midst of ignorance, and often sceptical in the midst of knowledge. The man who is puffed up with this philosophical pride, whether divine or theist, or atheist, deserves

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