s who might
have known better. We may pick holes in the celebrated antithesis

For forms of government let fools contest:
Whate'er is best administered is best;
For forms of faith let graceless zealots fight,
He can't be wrong whose life is in the right.

Certainly, they are not mathematically accurate formulae; but they are
generous, if imperfect, statements of great truths, and not unbecoming
in the mouth of the man who, as the member of an unpopular sect, learnt
to be cosmopolitan rather than bitter, and expressed his convictions in
the well-known words addressed to Swift: 'I am of the religion of
Erasmus, a Catholic; so I live, so I shall die; and hope one day to meet
you, Bishop Atterbury, the younger Craggs, Dr. Garth, Dean Berkeley, and
Mr. Hutchinson in heaven.' Who would wish to shorten the list? And the
scheme of morality which Pope deduced for practical guidance in life is
in harmony with the spirit which breathes in those words just quoted. A
recent dispute in a court of justice shows that even our most cultivated
men have forgotten Pope so far as to be ignorant of the source of the
familiar words--

What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards?
Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards.

It is therefore necessary to say explicitly that the poem where they
occur, the fourth epistle of the 'Essay on Man,' not only contains
half-a-dozen other phrases equally familiar--_e.g._, 'An honest man's
the noblest work of God;'[3] 'Looks through nature up to nature's God;'
'From grave to gay, from lively to severe'--but breathes throughout
sentiments which it would be credulous to believe that any man could
express so vigorously without feeling profoundly. Mr. Ruskin has quoted
one couplet as giving 'the most complete, the most concise, and the most
lofty expression of moral temper existing in English words'--

Never elated, while one man's oppressed;
Never dejected, whilst another's blessed.

The passage in which they occur is worthy of this (let us admit, just a
little over-praised) sentiment; and leads not unfitly to the conclusion
and summary of the whole, that he who can recognise the beauty of
virtue knows that

Where Faith, Law, Morals, all began,
All end--in love of God and love of man.

I know but too well all that may be said against this view of Pope's
morality. He is, as Ste.-Beuve says, the easiest of all men to
caricature; and it is equally easy to throw