w. The Second Book was
to treat of Man Intellectual; the Third Book, of Man Social, including
ties to Church and State; the Fourth Book, of Man Moral, was to
illustrate abstract truth by sketches of character. This part of the
design is represented by the Moral Essays, of which four were written, to
which was added, as a fifth, the Epistle to Addison which had been
written much earlier, in 1715, and first published in 1720. The four
Moral essays are two pairs. One pair is upon the Characters of Men and
on the Characters of Women, which would have formed the opening of the
subject of the Fourth Book of the Essay: the other pair shows character
expressed through a right or a wrong use of Riches: in fact, Money and
Morals. The four Epistles were published separately. The fourth (to the
Earl of Burlington) was first published in 1731, its title then being "Of
Taste;" the third (to Lord Bathurst) followed in 1732, the year of the
publication of the first two Epistles on the "Essay on Man." In 1733,
the year of publication of the Third Epistle of the "Essay on Man," Pope
published his Moral Essay of the "Characters of Men." In 1734 followed
the Fourth Epistle of the "Essay on Man;" and in 1735 the "Characters of
Women," addressed to Martha Blount, the woman whom Pope loved, though he
was withheld by a frail body from marriage. Thus the two works were, in
fact, produced together, parts of one design.

Pope's Satires, which still deal with characters of men, followed
immediately, some appearing in a folio in January, 1735. That part of
the epistle to Arbuthnot forming the Prologue, which gives a character of
Addison, as Atticus, had been sketched more than twelve years before, and
earlier sketches of some smaller critics were introduced; but the
beginning and the end, the parts in which Pope spoke of himself and of
his father and mother, and his friend Dr. Arbuthnot, were written in 1733
and 1734. Then follows an imitation of the first Epistle of the Second
Book of the Satires of Horace, concerning which Pope told a friend, "When
I had a fever one winter in town that confined me to my room for five or
six days, Lord Bolingbroke, who came to see me, happened to take up a
Horace that lay on the table, and, turning it over, dropped on the first
satire in the Second Book, which begins, 'Sunt, quibus in satira.' He
observed how well that would suit my case if I were to imitate it in
English. After he was gone, I read it