Gibbs was born about 1674 and died in 1754. He designed St. Martin's church in London, and the Radcliffe library at Oxford. Sir Kit is Sir Christopher Wren. A century after the dome of St. Peter's was erected, Bernini inserted staircases in the hollow piers which support the cupola, and the cracks in the dome were falsely ascribed to his operations. The martins are not more infallible than man, and, unlike man, they do not profit by experience. White of Selborne relates that they built in the window corners of a house in his neighbourhood, where the recess was too shallow to protect their work, which was washed down with every hard rain, and yet year after year they persevered through the summer in their useless drudgery.
[1314] Bolingbroke, Fragment 51: "We are designed to be social, not solitary creatures. Mutual wants unite us, and natural benevolence and political order, on which our happiness depends, are founded in them."—Wakefield.
[1315] Ether was reputed to be an element finer than air, and to fill the regions beyond our atmosphere. Some of the stoics believed that ether was the animating principle of all things, and Pope adopted the doctrine. Hence he calls ether "all-quickening," and says that "one nature feeds the vital flame" in all the creatures of earth, air, and water.
[1316] ] Bolingbroke, Fragment 51: "As our parents loved themselves in us, so we love ourselves in our children."—Wakefield.
Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel:
Our fond begetters who would never die,
Love but themselves in their posterity.
The lines from ver. 115 to ver. 124 are varied in the MS.:
Quick with this spirit new-born nature moved,
Itself each creature in its species loved;
Each sought a pleasure not possessed alone,
Each sex desired alike till two were one.
This impulse animates; one nature feeds
The vital lamp, and swells the genial seeds:
All spread their image with like ardour stung,
All love themselves, reflected in their young.
Dr. George Campbell remarks, in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, that to talk of creatures loving themselves in their progeny is nonsensical rant. Of many fathers and mothers it would be nearer the truth to say that they love their children almost to the exclusion of themselves. Neither Pope nor Bolingbroke had children, and not having experienced, they misapprehended, the parental feeling.
[1317] Pope's division of duties is not the law of creation. In a multiplicity of cases both parents feed, and both defend their young. When the sire is of no use in providing food, as with grass-eating animals, he equally abandons his defending function, and does not even recognise his offspring.