Gay rainbow silks her mellow charms infold,
And nought of Lycé but herself is old.
Her grizzled locks assume a smirking grace,
And art has levell'd her deep-furrow'd face.
Her strange demand no mortal can approve,
We'll ask her blessing, but can't ask her love.
She grants indeed a lady may decline
(All ladies but herself) at ninety-nine.

Oh how unlike her was the sacred age
Of prudent Portia! Her gray hairs engage,
Whose thoughts are suited to her life's decline;
Virtue's the paint can make the wrinkles shine.
That, and that only can old age sustain;
Which yet all wish, nor know they wish for pain.

Then please the best; and know, for men of sense,
Your strongest charms are native innocence.
Arts on the mind, like paint upon the face,
Fright him that's worth your love from your em-
brace.

In simple manners all the secret lies;

Be kind and virtuous, you'll be blest and wisc.
Vain show and noise intoxicate the brain,
Begin with giddiness and end in pain.
Affect not empty fame and idle praise,
Which all those wretches I describe betrays.
Your sex's glory 'tis to shine unknown;
Of all applause, be fondest of your own.
Beware the fever of the mind! that thirst
With which the age is eminently cursed.
To drink of pleasure but inflames desire,
And abstinence alone can quench the fire,
Take pain from life and terror from the tomb,
Give peace in hand and promise bliss to come.

When Henry Sacheverell was impeached for his two political sermons, preached at Derby and St. Paul's, in August and November, 1709, Benjamin Hoadly, rector of St. Peter's-le-Poor, was declared to have deserved well of the State for advocacy of those principles of the Revolution which Sacheverell attacked, and early in the reign of George I. Mr. Hoadly was made Bishop of Bangor. After the Jacobite rising of 1715, the new Bishop of Bangor wrote a treatise entitled "A Preservative against the Principles and Practices of the Nonjurors in Church and State." It was directed against two principles-namely, that only hereditary princes in the direct line can have claim to the throne, and that the lay power cannot deprive bishops. This argument was followed, in March, 1717, by a sermon on "the Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ,” preached before the king, upon the text "My kingdom is not of this world," in which he declared that no earthly body has right of restriction or interference by penalties in matters of faith. From this book and this sermon by Dr. Hoadly, Bishop of Bangor, arose a hot argument known as the "Bangorian Controversy." The Lower House of Convocation lost no time in issuing a Representation of what it regarded as the dangerous tendency of the Bishop of Bangor's arguments. The bishop who especially represented the form of opinion on civil and religious policy to which Hoadly opposed himself,

was Francis Atterbury. He had been chaplain to Queen Anne, Dean of Carlisle, and Dean of Christchurch, and in 1713 was made Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster. After the accession of George I. he warmly opposed the Whig government, and, suspected as a zealous Jacobite of favouring the Pretender, he was sent to the Tower in August, 1722. In March of the following year he was arraigned before the House of Commons, and in May sentenced to deprivation of all his ecclesiastical preferments, and banishment for life. He left England in June, 1723, meeting at Calais Bolingbroke, who had then obtained leave to return. Atterbury died abroad in 1732. His sermons were published in 1740.

While the spirit of religion suffered much through bitterness of controversy on its forms, bold questioning continued, which looked more and more to the innermost life of religion and society. Authority, especially in France, associated with corruption, lost respect; and many earnest men were on their way to doubt whether the whole fabric of civilised society were not a helpless complication of untruths, and faith in God Himself a superstition. A wild stream of thought was broadening and rolling on towards a Revolution that would touch the interests of Europe. The reaction against formalism and insincerity affected the most vigorous minds, whatever their tendencies of thought. Pope, who under Queen Anne had written about writing, and spent wit on the theft of a lock of hair, after earning money in the reign of George I. by translation of Homer, grew with the time in which he lived, deepened in thought as the years passed over him, and under George II. dealt in Moral Essays with the higher duties of life, and in his "Essay on Man" sought, in accordance with the argument of Leibnitz's "Theodicée," to meet the new questioning of God's justice in the order of the world. In 1731 his Epistle to the Earl of Burlington on Taste satirised the misuse of wealth, in that false

luxury against which many minds were then rebelling. It was followed in 1732 by another Moral Essay-his Epistle to Lord Bathurst on the Use of Riches. It was here that Pope paid honour to the memory of John Kyrle, of Ross, in Herefordshire, who died in 1724, aged eighty-seven, after a life spent in bettering that corner of the world in which he lived. His own estate was not large, but he could achieve much by awakening in those about him a will to assist his enterprises for the common good.

HIS NEIGHBOURS' FRIEND.

But all our praises why should lords engross? Rise, honest Muse! and sing the Man of Ross: Pleased Vaga' echoes through her winding bounds, And rapid Severn hoarse applause resounds.

1 Vaga, the Wye. Ross is a town of about 3,000 inhabitants, beautifully placed by the Wye, on the top of a precipice, twelve miles from Hereford. The tall, "heaven-directed spire" of the church, rising from among trees, is seen from afar. John Kyrle, who was born at Ross in 1637, in a house yet standing, cared for the beauty of the churchyard and planted elms. It is said that when two of the elms were afterwards cut down, by order of a dull churchwarden, the roots started off vigorous shoots that pierced the wall underground, and came up in the church within the pew that had been Kyrle's.

Who hung with woods yon mountain's sultry brow?
From the dry rock who bade the waters flow,
Not to the skies in useless columns toss'd,
Or in proud falls magnificently lost,

But clear and artless, pouring through the plain
Health to the sick, and solace to the swain.
Whose causeway parts the vale with shady rows?
Whose seats the weary traveller repose?
Who taught that heaven-directed spire to rise?
"The Man of Ross," each lisping babe replies.
Behold the market-place with poor o'erspread!
The Man of Ross divides the weekly bread:
He feeds yon alms-house, neat, but void of state,
Where Age and Want sit smiling at the gate;
Him portion'd maids, apprenticed orphans bless'd,
The young who labour, and the old who rest.
Is any sick? the Man of Ross relieves,
Prescribes, attends, the medicine makes, and gives.
Is there a variance? enter but his door,
Balk'd are the courts, and contest is no more.
Despairing quacks with curses fled the place,
And vile attorneys, now an useless race.

B. Thrice happy man! enabled to pursue
What all so wish, but want the power to do!
Oh say, what sums that generous hand supply?
What mines to swell that boundless charity?

P. Of debts and taxes, wife and children clear, This man possess'd-five hundred pounds a year. Blush, Grandeur, blush! proud courts, withdraw your blaze,

Ye little stars, hide your diminish'd rays!

B. And what? no monument, inscription, stone? His race, his form, his name almost unknown?

P. Who builds a church to God, and not to fame, Will never mark the marble with his name: Go, search it there, where to be born, and die, Of rich and poor makes all the history; Enough, that Virtue fill'd the space between; Proved, by the ends of being, to have been.

In the year of the publication of this Essay (1732) Pope published also the first two Epistles of his Essay on Man;" in the following year the third Epistle of that series, and his Characters of Men. In 1734 followed the fourth Epistle of the " Essay on Man," and the series was closed in 1738 with

THE UNIVERSAL PRAYER.

Father of all! in every age,

In every clime adored,

By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

Thou great First Cause, least understood,
Who all my sense confined

To know but this, that Thou art good,
And that myself am blind;

Yet gave me, in this dark estate,

To see the good from ill;

And, binding nature fast in fate,

Left free the human will.

What conscience dictates to be done,

Or warns me not to do;

This, teach me more than hell to shun; That, more than heaven pursue.

What blessings Thy free bounty gives,

Let me not cast away;

For God is paid when man receives;
To enjoy is to obey.

Yet not to earth's contracted span

Thy goodness let me bound,
Or think Thee Lord alone of man,

When thousand worlds are round:

Let not this weak, unknowing hand
Presume Thy bolts to throw,
And deal damnation round the land
On each I judge Thy foc.

If I am right, Thy grace impart, Still in the right to stay;

If I am wrong, oh teach my heart To find that better way!

Save me alike from foolish pride,
Or impious discontent
At aught Thy wisdom has denied
Or aught Thy goodness lent.

Teach me to feel another's woe,
To hide the fault I see;
That mercy I to others show,

That mercy show to me.

Mean though I am, not wholly so, Since quicken'd by Thy breath; Oh lead me, wheresoe'er I go,

Through this day's life or death!

This day, be bread and peace my lot: All else beneath the sun

Thou know'st if best bestow'd or not, And let Thy will be done.

To Thee, whose temple is all space,
Whose altar, earth, sea, skies,
One chorus let all Being raise !
All Nature's incense rise!

Pope's "Essay on Man" appeared in the years 1732-34, to be completed by the addition of "The Universal Prayer" in 1738. Butler's " Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature" was published in 1736, and represents endeavour of a different kind to meet the form of doubt against which the " Essay on Man" was directed.

Joseph Butler, the son of a Presbyterian tradesman, was born at Wantage in 1692. He was taught for a time by Jeremiah Jones, of Tewkesbury, under whom he had Isaac Watts for a schoolfellow. He was to be trained for the ministry outside the Established Church, but turned to the Church, and entered Oriel College, Oxford. Before he left school, Butler had written remarks on the argument of Dr. Samuel Clarke's first Boyle Lecture. At college he formed a close friendship with Edward Talbot, son of the Bishop of Durham, to whose good offices he was indebted for some of his steps towards advancement in the Church. In 1718 Joseph Butler became

preacher at the Rolls, and in 1724 rector of Stanhope. In 1726 he gave up his office at the Rolls Chapel, and went to live in his rectory. He next became chaplain to Lord Chancellor Talbot, and in 1736 Clerk of the Closet to Queen Caroline. This was his position when he published his "Analogy," one of the most valued aids to the cause of religion furnished by the Church of England in the eighteenth century. Two years afterwards, in 1738, Joseph Butler was made Bishop of Bristol. He

It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among all people of discernment; and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals, for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world. On the contrary, thus much, at least, will be here found, not taken for granted, but proved, that any reasonable man, who will thoroughly consider the matter, may be as much assured, as he is of his own being, that it is not, however, so clear a case that there is nothing in it. There is, I think, strong evidence of its truth; but it is certain no one can, upon principles of reason, be satisfied of the contrary. And the practical consequence to be drawn from this is not attended to by every one who is concerned in it.

The Introduction touches on the nature of probability from observations of likeness, and the degrees of presumption, opinion, or full conviction which it will necessarily produce in every human mind. "I shall not," Butler says

I shall not take upon me to say how far the extent, compass, and force of analogical reasoning can be reduced to general heads and rules, and the whole be formed into a system. But though so little in this way has been attempted by those who have treated of our intellectual powers, and the exercise of them, this does not hinder but that we may be, as we unquestionably are, assured that Analogy is of weight, in various degrees, towards determining our judgment and our practice. Nor does it in any wise cease to be of weight in those cases, because persons, either given to dispute, or who require things to be stated with greater exactness than our faculties appear to admit of in practical matters, may find other cases in which 'tis not easy to say whether it be or be not of any weight; or instances of seeming analogies, which are really of none. It is enough to the present purpose to observe that this general way of arguing is evidently natural, just, and conclusive. For there is no man can make a question but that the sun will rise to-morrow; and be seen, where it is seen at all, in the figure of a circle, and not in that of a square.

Hence, namely, from analogical reasoning, Origen has with singular sagacity observed that "he who believes the Scripture to have proceeded from Him who is the Author of Nature, may well expect to find the same sort of difficulties in it, as are found in the constitution of Nature." And in a like way of reflection it may be added, that he who denies the Scripture to have been from God upon account of these difficulties, may, for the very same reason, deny the world to have been formed by Him. On the other hand, if there be an Analogy or likeness between that system of things and dispensation of Providence, which revelation informs us of, and that system of things and dispensation of Providence, which experience together with reason informs us of, i.e., the known course of nature; this is a presumption that they have both the same author and cause; at least, so far as to answer objections against the former's being from God, drawn from anything which is analogical or similar to what is in the latter, which is acknowledged to be from Him: for an Author of Nature is here supposed."

Some

It is just, he says, to argue from known facts to others that are like them; " from that part of the Divine Government over intelligent creatures which comes under our view, to that larger and more general government over them which is beyond it; and from what is present to collect what is likely, credible, or not incredible, will be hereafter." not attending to what is the fact in the constitution of nature, idly speculate on what the world might be had it been framed otherwise than it is. But we have not faculties for this kind of speculation. We are not even judges of "what may be the necessary means of raising and conducting one person to the highest perfection and happiness of his nature. Nay, even in the little affairs of the present life we find men of different educations and ranks are not competent judges of the conduct of each other." Let us turn then, says Butler, to experience,