cting creation, as if it would be true
philosophy to account for the origin and existence of some great city,
such as the city of Washington in the United States, built, as we know,
for purely political purposes, by showing that,--as it was remarkable
for its order, for the rectilinear directness of its streets, and the
rectangularity of its squares,--it must have been erected simply to be a
perfect embodiment of regularity; and to urge further that, save in
their character as component parts of a perfect whole, the House of
Representatives and the mansion of the President were of no more
intrinsic importance, or no more decidedly the _end_ of the whole, than
any low tavern or outhouse in the lesser streets or lanes. The
destruction of either the outhouse or the House of Representatives would
equally form a void in the general plan of the city, regarded as an
admirably arranged whole. And it was thus with the grand scheme of
creation; for,

"From nature's chain whatever link we strike,
Tenth or tenth thousand, breaks the chain alike."

Nor is it in other than due keeping with such a view of creation, that
its great Author should be represented as a cold abstraction, without
love or regard, and equally indifferent to the man and the sparrow, to
the atom and the planet. Order has respect to but the _relations_ of
things or of beings,--not to the things or beings themselves; order is
the _figure_ which, as mere etched points or strokes, they compose,--the
legend which, as signs or characters, they form; and who cares anything
for the component strokes or dots irrespective of the print, or for the
component letters or words apart from the writing? The "equal eye," in
such a scheme, would of necessity be an indifferent one. Against this
strange doctrine, though in some measure countenanced by the glosses of
Warburton in his defence of Pope, the theologians protested,--none of
them, however, more vigorously than Johnson, in his famous critique on
the "Free Inquiry" of Soame Jenyns. Nor is it uninteresting to mark with
what a purely instinctive feeling of the right some of the better poets,
whose "lyre," according to Cowper, was their "heart," protested against
it too. Poor Goldsmith, when sitting a homeless vagabond on the slopes
of the Alps, could exclaim in a greatly truer tone than that of his
polished predecessor,--

"Creation's heir, the world, the world is mine!"

And in Cowper himself we find all Goldsmith's int