"Pope, Alexander - Essay on Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pope Alexander)

their arguments against it would equally apply to the Lord's Prayer, of
which it is, in some degree, a paraphrase.

The first design of the Essay on Man arranged it into four books, each
consisting of a distinct group of Epistles. The First Book, in four
Epistles, was to treat of man in the abstract, and of his relation to the
Universe. That is the whole work as we have it now. 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 over, translated it in a morning or two, and sent it to press in
a week or a fortnight after" (February, 1733). "And this was the occasion
of my imitating some others of the Satires and Epistles." The two
dialogues finally used as the Epilogue to the Satires were first published
in the year 1738, with the name of the year, "Seventeen Hundred and
Thirty-eight." Samuel Johnson's "London," his first bid for recognition,
appeared in the same week, and excited in Pope not admiration only, but
some active endeavour to be useful to its author.