and one of the buoys for narrowing the uncertainties of a difficult navigation, absolutely under another aspect, differently approached and differently associated, did the treacherous office of a _spanselled_ horse, as in past days upon the Cornish and the South Irish coast it was employed--expressly for showing false signals, and leading right amongst breakers. That _hortus siccus_ of pet notions, which had won Pope's fancy in their insulated and separate existence, when brought together as parts and elements of the same system in the elaborate and haughty 'Essay on Man,' absolutely refused to cohere. No doctoring, no darning, could disguise their essential inter-repulsion. Dismal rents, chasms, hiatuses, gaped and grinned in a theory whose very office and arrogant pretension had been to harmonize the dislocated face of nature, and to do _that_ in the way of justification for God which God had forgotten to do for himself. How if an enemy should come, and fill up these ugly chasms with some poisonous fungus of a nature to spread the dry rot through the main timbers of the vessel? And, in fact, such an enemy _did_ come. This enemy spread dismay through Pope's heart. Pope found himself suddenly shown up as an anti-social monster, as an incendiary, as a disorganizer of man's most aspiring hopes. 'O Heavens! What is to be done? what _can_ be done?' he cried out. 'When I wrote that passage, which now seems so wicked, certainly I meant something very good; or, if I didn't, at any rate I meant to mean it.' The case was singular; if no friend of the author's could offer a decent account of its meaning, to a certainty the author could _not_. Luckily, however, there are two ways of filling up chasms; and Warburton, who had reasons best known to himself for cultivating Pope's favor, besides considerable practice during his youth in a special pleader's office, took the desperate case in hand. He caulked the chasms with philosophic oakum, he 'payed' them with dialectic pitch, he sheathed them with copper and brass by means of audacious dogmatism and insolent quibbles, until the enemy seemed to have been silenced, and the vessel righted so far as to float. The result, however, as a permanent result, was this--that the demurs which had once been raised (however feebly pressed) against the poem, considered in the light of a system compatible with religion, settled upon it permanently as a sullen cloud of suspicion that a century has not availed to dissipate. NOTE 9.