Book ii. chap. 12 of Montaigne's Essays.

[1308] The geometric, or garden-spider, makes a web of concentric circles, but the house-spider, which used to have credit for weaving a web of parallel longitudinal lines crossed by parallel transverse lines, observes no such regularity in the construction of her toils.

[1309] An eminent mathematician.--POPE.

He was born in France in 1667. Driven from his native country in 1685 by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, he settled in London, and died there in 1754. He got his living mainly by teaching mathematics, in which his skill was consummate, and his publications on the subject attest the acuteness and originality of his genius. He was on terms of friendship with Newton.

[1310] The poet probably took the hint of this passage from Lord Bacon's De augmentis scientiarum: "Who taught the raven in a drought to throw pebbles into an hollow tree where she espied water, that the water might rise so as she might come to it? Who taught the bee to sail through such a vast sea of air, and to find a way from the field in flower, a great way off to her hive?"--RUFFHEAD.

[1311] MS.:

Through air's vast oceans see the storks explore, Columbus-like, a world unknown before.

[1312] From Le Spectacle de la Nature of the Abbé Pluche: "Who informed their young that it would be requisite to travel into a foreign country? What particular bird takes the charge upon him of assembling their grand council, and fixing the day of their departure?"

[1313] The MS. has the lines which follow:

Boast we of arts? a bee can better hit The squares than Gibbs, the bearings than Sir Kit. To poise his dome a martin has the knack, While bold Bernini lets St. Peter's crack.

Gibbs was born about 1674 and died in 1754. He designed St. Martin's church in London, and the Radcliffe library at Oxford. Sir Kit is Sir Christopher Wren. A century after the dome of St. Peter's was erected, Bernini inserted staircases in the hollow piers which support the cupola, and the cracks in the dome were falsely ascribed to his operations. The martins are not more infallible than man, and, unlike man, they do not profit by experience. White of Selborne relates that they built in the window corners of a house in his neighbourhood, where the recess was too shallow to protect their work, which was washed down with every hard rain, and yet year after year they persevered through the summer in their useless drudgery.

[1314] Bolingbroke, Fragment 51: "We are designed to be social, not solitary creatures. Mutual wants unite us, and natural benevolence and political order, on which our happiness depends, are founded in them."--WAKEFIELD.

[1315] Ether was reputed to be an element finer than air, and to fill the regions beyond our atmosphere. Some of the stoics believed that ether was the animating principle of all things, and Pope adopted the doctrine. Hence he calls ether "all-quickening," and says that "one nature feeds the vital flame" in all the creatures of earth, air, and water.

[1316] Bolingbroke, Fragment 51: "As our parents loved themselves in us, so we love ourselves in our children."--WAKEFIELD.

Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel:

Our fond begetters who would never die, Love but themselves in their posterity.

The lines from ver. 115 to ver. 124 are varied in the MS.:

Quick with this spirit new-born nature moved, Itself each creature in its species loved; Each sought a pleasure not possessed alone, Each sex desired alike till two were one. This impulse animates; one nature feeds The vital lamp, and swells the genial seeds: All spread their image with like ardour stung, All love themselves, reflected in their young.

Dr. George Campbell remarks, in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, that to talk of creatures loving themselves in their progeny is nonsensical rant. Of many fathers and mothers it would be nearer the truth to say that they love their children almost to the exclusion of themselves. Neither Pope nor Bolingbroke had children, and not having experienced, they misapprehended, the parental feeling.

[1317] Pope's division of duties is not the law of creation. In a multiplicity of cases both parents feed, and both defend their young. When the sire is of no use in providing food, as with grass-eating animals, he equally abandons his defending function, and does not even recognise his offspring.

[1318] MS.:

Till taught to range the wood, or wing the air, There instinct ends its passion and its care.

[1319] Locke, Civil Government, book ii. chap. vii. sect. 79: "The conjunction between male and female ought to last so long as is necessary to the support of the young ones. And herein, I think, lies the chief, if not the only reason, why the male and female in mankind are tied to a longer conjunction than other creatures, whose young being able to subsist of themselves before the time of procreation returns again, the conjugal bond dissolves of itself."

[1320] Bolingbroke, Fragment 3: "Reason improved sociability, extended it to relations more remote, and united several families into one community, as instinct had united several individuals into one family." "Interest" in Pope's line signifies "advantage." Reason, he says, teaches man to improve on the ties of instinct, and form connections beyond his immediate family, whereby he at once extends his love, and the advantages derived from it.

[1321] That is, man becomes constant from choice.

[1322] MS.:

And ev'ry tender passion takes its turn.

The line in the text alludes to Pope's hypothesis that every virtue is grafted upon a ruling passion.

[1323] "Charity" is used in the antiquated sense of "love." "New needs," says Pope, give rise to "new helps," and the virtue "benevolence" is grafted upon the natural affections.

[1324] He means that the latest brood, being young children, love their parents by nature, while the previous brood, being grown up, only love parents from habit.

[1325] MS.:

Scarce had the last the parents' care outgrown Before they saw those parents want their own.

Dryden, Palamon and Arcite, Book iii.:

and issuing into man, Grudges their life from whence his own began.

[1326] MS.:

Stretch the long interest, and support the line.

[1327] The MS. goes on thus:

She spake, and man her high behests obeyed; Harmless amidst his fellow-beasts he strayed; For pride was not; joint tenant of the shade He shared with beasts his table and his bed; No murder etc.

"He speaks," says M. Crousaz, "of what passed in the earliest ages of the world no less positively than an eye-witness." Pope followed the ancient fable which he may have read, among other places, in Montaigne's Essays, Book ii. Chap. 12: "Plato, in his picture of the golden age under Saturn, reckons, among the chief advantages that a man then had, his communications with beasts, by which he acquired a very perfect intelligence and prudence, and led his life more happily than we could do."

[1328] "Her birth" is the birth of nature. The personification of nature in the phrase "the state of nature," or "the natural state," is so forced, that we do not at once perceive that "nature" is the noun to which "her" refers.

[1329] "Union" is put for voluntary union, the union of social affection, in contrast to the bonds of fear, coercion, and the necessities of life, which are large elements in the present condition of mankind. The beasts were included in the common league, and animals of prey unknown in Pope's state of nature. But he did not keep steady to his first account.

[1330] So Hall, Satires, Book iii. Sat. 1:

Then crept in pride, and peevish covetise, And man grew greedy, discordous, and nice. Now man that erst hail-fellow was with beast, Woxe on to ween himself a god at least.--WAKEFIELD.

[1331] Dryden, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book xv.:

The woolly fleece that clothed her murderer.

[1332] Virgil, Ecl. x. 58: "lucos sonantes;" Dryden, "sounding woods."--WAKEFIELD.

[1333] MS.:

He called on heav'n for blessing, they for food.

[1334] MS.:

Unstained with gore the grassy altar grew, Priests yet were temperate, yet no passions knew; Nor yet would glutton zeal devoutly eat, Nor faithful av'rice hugged his god in plate.

The pagans feasted upon the meat they offered to idols, which is what we are to understand by the "glutton zeal" that "devoutly eats."

[1335] Dryden, Virg. Æn. ix. 640:

Ah how unlike the living is the dead.--WAKEFIELD.

[1336] MS.:

Of half that live himself the living tomb.

[1337] MS.:

Who, foe to nature, other kinds o'erthrown Restless he seeks dominion o'er his own.

Or,

Who deaf to nature's universal groan, Murders all other kinds, betrays his own.

This is the same amiable being who is celebrated, ver. 51, for "helping the wants and woes of other creatures," and sparing singing-birds and gilded insects out of pure compassion.

[1338] Pope probably meant that man was a "fiercer savage" than the animals of which he shed the blood, but as the "blood" only is mentioned, there is no proper positive to the comparative.

[1339] Dryden in his version of the speech of Pythagoras in Ovid, Met.