The Essay on Man was at first given, as Mr. Pope told me, to Dr. Young, to Dr. Desaguliers,[721] to Lord Bolingbroke, to Lord Paget,[722] and in short to everybody but to him who was capable of writing it. While several of his acquaintances read the Essay on Man as the work of an unknown author, they fairly owned they did not understand it,[723] but when the reputation of the poem became secured by the knowledge of the writer, it soon grew so clear and intelligible, that, on the appearance of the Comment on it, they told him they wondered the editor should think a large and minute interpretation necessary.--WARBURTON. [In 1733] Pope 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, 1725, be rightly explained by the commentator,[724] 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 with 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,[725] 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. Those friends of Pope that were trusted with the secret went about lavishing honours on the new-born poet, and hinting that Pope was never so much in danger from any former rival. To those authors whom he had personally offended, and to those whose opinion the world considered as decisive, and whom he suspected of envy or malevolence, he sent his Essay as a present before publication, that they might defeat their own enmity by praises which they could not afterwards decently retract. With these precautions, in 1732[3] was published the first part of the Essay on Man. There had been for some time a report that Pope was busy upon a system of morality; but this design was not discovered in the new poem, which had a form and a title with which its readers were unacquainted. Its reception was not uniform; some thought it a very imperfect piece, though not without good lines. While the author was unknown, some, as will always happen, favoured him as an adventurer, and some censured him as an intruder, but all thought him above neglect: the sale increased, and editions were multiplied. The second and third Epistles were published, and Pope was, I believe, more and more suspected of writing them.