comparison; but it must be remembered that he had the power of
favouring himself. He might have originally had publication in his
mind, and have written with care, or have afterwards selected those
which he had most happily conceived or most diligently laboured; and
I know not whether there does not appear something more studied and
artificial in his productions than the rest, except one long letter
by Bolingbroke, composed with all the skill and industry of a
professed author. It is indeed not easy to distinguish affectation
from habit; he that has once studiously formed a style, rarely
writes afterwards with complete ease. Pope may be said to write
always with his reputation in his head; Swift, perhaps, like a man
that remembered he was writing to Pope; but Arbuthnot, like one who
lets thoughts drop from his pen as they rise into his mind. Before
these "Letters" appeared he published the first part of what he
persuaded himself to think a system of Ethics, under the title of an
"Essay on Man," which, if his letter to Swift (of September 14,
1723), be rightly explained by the commentator, had been eight years
under his consideration, and of which he seems to have desired the
success with great solicitude. He had now many open, and doubtless
many secret, enemies. The "Dunces" were yet smarting from the war,
and the superiority which he publicly arrogated disposed the world
to wish his humiliation. All this he knew, and against all this he
provided. His own name, and that of his friend to whom the work is
inscribed, were in the first editions carefully suppressed; and the
poem being of a new kind was ascribed to one or another as favour
determined or conjecture wandered. It was given, says Warburton, to
every man except him only who could write it. Those who like only
when they like the author, and who are under the dominion of a name,
condemned it, and those admired it who are willing to scatter praise
at random, which, while it is unappropriated, excites no envy.