[1247] From La Rochefoucauld, Maxim 36: "Nature seems to have bestowed pride on us, on purpose to save us the pain of knowing our own imperfections."—Warton.
[1248] Bolingbroke, Frag. 50: "Hope, that cordial drop, which sweetens every bitter potion, even the last."—Wakefield.
MS.:
With ev'ry age of man new passions rise,
Hope travels through nor quits him when he dies.
[1249] The lines, ver. 275-282, first appeared in the edition of 1743. They were evidently suggested by a passage in Garth's Dispensary, Canto v.:
Children at toys as men at titles aim,
And in effect both covet but the same,
This Philip's son proved in revolving years,
And first for rattles, then for worlds shed tears.
[1250] When Pope used the phrase "a little louder," he was thinking of the "rattle," and forgot the "straw."
[1251] The "garters" refer to the badge of the order of the garter. "Scarf," in the sense of a badge of honour, was in Pope's day appropriated to the nobleman's chaplain. "His sister," says Swift, speaking of a clerical time-server in his Essay on the Fates of Clergymen, "procured him a scarf from my lord." Addison in the Spectator, No. 21, compares bishops, deans, and archdeacons to generals; doctors of divinity, prebendaries, and "all that wear scarves" to field-officers; and the rest of the clergy to subalterns. "There has been," he says, "a great exceeding of late years in the second division, several brevets having been granted for the converting of subalterns into scarf-officers, insomuch that within my memory the price of lute-string"—the material of which the scarf was made—"is raised above twopence in a yard." The number of chaplains a nobleman could "qualify" varied with his rank. A duke might nominate six, a baron three. The distinction, when Pope wrote his Essay, was too slight to be fitly classed with orders of knighthood.
[1252] The infant's pleasure in trifles may be the kindly work of nature providing for the enjoyments of an age incapable of better things; but the maturer delight in the "scarfs, garters, gold," is not the work of nature, but of folly. The first is a harmless instinct; the other a culpable vanity.—Croly.
[1253] Small balls of glass or pearl, or other substance, strung upon a thread, and used by the Romanists to count their prayers; from whence the phrase "to tell beads," or to be at one's "beads," is, to be at prayer.—Johnson.