n rags, one flutters in brocade;
The cobbler apron'd, and the parson gown'd,
The friar hooded, and the monarch crown'd.
"What differ more (you cry) than crown and cowl?"
I'll tell you, friend, a wise man and a fool.
You'll find, if once the monarch acts the monk,
Or, cobbler-like, the parson will be drunk,
Worth makes the man, and want of it, the fellow;
The rest is all but leather or prunello.

Go! if your ancient but ignoble blood
Has crept through scoundrels ever since the flood,
Go! and pretend your family is young,
Nor own your fathers have been fools so long.
What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards?
Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards.

Who wickedly is wise, or madly brave,
Is but the more a fool, the more a knave.
Who noble ends by noble means obtains,
Or failing, smiles in exile or in chains,
Like good Aurelius let him reign, or bleed
Like Socrates,--that man is great indeed.

An honest man's the noblest work of God.

Know then this truth (enough for man to know),
"Virtue alone is happiness below."

... Never elated while one man's oppress'd;
Never dejected while another's bless'd....[C]

See the sole bliss heaven could on all bestow!
Which who but feels can taste, but thinks can know:
Yet poor with fortune, and with learning blind,
The bad must miss, the good untaught will find:
Slave to no sect, who takes no private road,
But looks through nature up to nature's God;
Pursues that chain which links the immense design,
Joins heaven and earth, and mortal and divine:
Sees that no being any bliss can know,
But touches some above and some below;
Learns from this union of the rising whole,
The first, last purpose of the human soul;
And knows where faith, law, morals, all began,
All end, in love of God and love of man.

FOOTNOTES:

[B] If the _Essay on Man_ were shivered into fragments, it would not
lose its value: for it is precisely its details which constitute its
moral as well as literary beauties.--A. W. WARD, _quoted by_ MARK
PATTISON.

[C] In these two lines, which, so far as I know, are the most
complete, the most concise, and the most lofty expressions of moral
temper existing in English words, Pope sums the law of noble life.

RUSKIN, _Lectures on Art_.

XVIII. RULE, BRITANNIA.

JAMES THOMSON.--1700-1748.