His _Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard_ (a romantic version of a very realistic story), _Temple of Fame_, _Imitations of Chaucer_, translation of the _Iliad_ (1713-1720)--characterised by Gibbon as having “every merit but that of likeness to its original”--an edition of Shakspere, _The Dunciad_ (1728), translation of the _Odyssey_, are some of the works which attest his genius and industry. But it is with his _Moral Essays_--and in particular the _Essay on Man_ (1732-1735), the most important of his productions--that we are especially concerned.
As is pretty well known, these _Essays_ owe their conception, in great part, to his intimate friend St. John Bolingbroke. Although the author by birth and, perhaps, still more from a feeling of pride which might make him reluctant to abandon an unfashionable sect (such it was at that time), belonged nominally to the Old Church, the theology and metaphysics of the work display little of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. The pervading principles of the _Essay on Man_ are natural theology or, as Warburton styles it, “Naturalism” (_i.e._, the putting aside human assertion for the study of the attributes of Deity through its visible manifestations) and Optimism.[145]
The merits of the _Essay_, it must be added, consist not so much in the philosophy of the poem as a whole as in the many fine and true thoughts scattered throughout it, which the author’s epigrammatic terseness indelibly fixes in the mind. Of the whole poem the most valuable part, undoubtedly, is its ridicule of the common arrogant (pretended) belief that all other species on the earth have been brought into being for the benefit of the human race--an egregious fallacy, by the way, which, ably exposed as it has been over and over again, still frequently reappears in our popular theology and morals. To the writers and talkers of this too numerous class may be commended the rebukes of Pope:--
“Nothing is foreign--parts relate to whole: One all-extending, all-preserving soul Connects each being, greatest with the least-- Made beast in aid of man, and man of beast: All served, all serving--nothing stands alone.
Has God, thou fool, worked solely for thy good, Thy joy, thy pastime, thy attire, thy food?