Reason itself more nicely shares in all.
[1164] MS.:
Passions whose ends are honest, means are fair.
[1165] "List," which would probably now be thought a vulgarism, was in Pope's day the established word. Our form, "enlist," was apparently unknown to Johnson, who did not insert it in his Dictionary.
[1166] "Passions that court an aim" is surely a strange expression.—Warton.
For "court" Pope had at first written "boast."
[1167] The "imparted" or sympathetic passions are the benevolent impulses and affections. As to their "kind," or nature, they are, says Pope, "modes of self-love," but when the self-love assumes the form of loving others the passion is "exalted, and takes the name of some virtue." He passes the affections over here with this slight allusion, and returns to them at ver. 255, and more at length in Epistle iii.
[1168] What says old Epictetus, who knew stoicism better than these men? "I am not to be apathetic or void of passions, like a statue. I am to discharge all the relations of a social and friendly life,—the parent, the husband, the brother, the magistrate." The stoic apathy was no more than a freedom from irrational and excessive agitations of the soul.—James Harris.
[1169] That is, in cold insensibility. Lady Chudleigh's dialogue on the death of her daughter:
Honour is ever the reward of pain:
A lazy virtue no applause will gain.—Wakefield.