Ver. 222. an enemy of all mankind!] Had all nations, with regard to their heroes, been of the humour with the Normans, who called Robert II., the greatest of their Dukes, by the name of Robert the Devil, the races of heroes might have been less numerous, or, however, less mischievous.
Ver. 267. Painful pre-eminence, &c.] This, to his friend, nor does it at all contradict what he had said to him concerning happiness, in the beginning of the Epistle:
'Tis never to be bought, but always free,
And fled from monarchs, St. John! dwells with thee.
For there he compliments his virtue; here he estimates the value of his politics, which he calls wisdom. He is now proving that nothing either external to man, or what is not in man's power, and of his own acquirement, can make him happy here. The most plausible rival of virtue is human wisdom: yet even this is so far from giving any degree of real happiness, that it deprives us of those common comforts of life, which are a kind of support, under the want of happiness. Such as the more innocent of those delusions which he speaks of in the second Epistle,
Those painted clouds that beautify our days, &c.
Now knowledge destroyeth all those comforts, by setting man above life's weaknesses; so that in him, who thinketh to attain happiness by knowledge alone, independent of virtue, the fable is reversed, and in a preposterous attempt to gain the substance, he loseth even the shadow. This I take to be the sense of this fine stroke of satire on the wrong pursuits after happiness.
| Ver. 281, 283. | If parts allure thee,— |
| Or ravished with the whistling of a name,] |
These two instances are chosen with great judgment. The world, perhaps, doth not afford two such other. Bacon discovered and laid down those true principles of science, by whose assistance Newton was enabled to unfold the whole law of nature. He was no less eminent for the creative power of his imagination, the brightness of his conceptions, and the force of his expression; yet being convicted on his own confession for bribery and corruption in the administration of justice, while he presided in the supreme court of equity, he endeavoured to repair his ruined fortunes by the most profligate flattery to the court, which, indeed, from his very first entrance into it, he had accustomed himself to practise with a prostitution that disgraceth the very profession of letters or of science.
Cromwell seemeth to be distinguished in the most eminent manner, with regard to his abilities, from all other great and wicked men, who have overturned the liberties of their country. The times in which others have succeeded in this attempt, were such as saw the spirit of liberty suppressed and stifled by a general luxury and venality; but Cromwell subdued his country, when this spirit was at its height, by a successful struggle against court-oppression; and while it was conducted and supported by a set of the greatest geniuses for government the world ever saw embarked together in one common cause.
Ver. 283. Or ravished with the whistling of a name,] And even this fantastic glory sometimes sutlers a terrible reverse. Sacheverel, in his Voyage to Icolm-kill, describing the church there, tells us, that "in one corner is a peculiar enclosure, in which were the monuments of the kings of many different nations, as Scotland, Ireland, Norway, and the Isle of Man. This (said the person who showed me the place, pointing to a plain stone) was the monument of the great Teague, king of Ireland. I had never heard of him, and could not but reflect of how little value is greatness, that has barely left a name scandalous to a nation, and a grave which the meanest of mankind would never envy."