early conversation which they heard, or some accident which excited
ardour and emulation. It must at least be allowed that this ruling
passion, antecedent to reason and observation, must have an object
independent on human contrivance, for there can be no natural desire
of artificial good. No man, therefore, can be born, in the strict
acceptation, a lover of money, for he may be born where money does
not exist; nor can he be born in a moral sense a lover of his
country, for society politically regulated is a state
contradistinguished from a state of nature, and any attention to
that coalition of interests which makes the happiness of a country
is possible only to those whom inquiry and reflection have enabled
to comprehend it. This doctrine is in itself pernicious as well as
false; its tendency is to produce the belief of a kind of moral
predestination or over-ruling principle which cannot be resisted.
He that admits it is prepared to comply with every desire that
caprice or opportunity shall excite, and to flatter himself that he
submits only to the lawful dominion of nature in obeying the
resistless authority of his ruling passion.

Pope has formed his theory with so little skill that in the examples
by which he illustrates and confirms it he has confounded passions,
appetites, and habits. To the "Characters of Men" he added soon
after, in an epistle supposed to have been addressed to Martha
Blount, but which the last edition has taken from her, the
"Characters of Women." This poem, which was laboured with great
diligence and in the author's opinion with great success, was
neglected at its first publication, as the commentator supposes,
because the public was informed by an advertisement that it
contained no character drawn from the life, an assertion which Pope
probably did not expect nor wished to have been believed, and which