Alexander Pope

MASONIC BIOGRAPHIES

ALEXANDER POPE

In his own words...

Know thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

A man should never be ashamed to admit that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

	Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things To low ambition and the pride of kings. Let us (since life can little more supply Than just to look about us, and to die) Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man; A mighty maze! but not without a plan.
	Essay on Man. Epistle i. Line 1.

This light and darkness in our chaos join'd,
What shall divide? The God within the mind.
Extremes in Nature equal ends produce,
In Man they join to some mysterious use;
Tho' each by turns the other’s bound invade,
As, in some well-wrought picture, light and shade,
And oft so mix, the diff'rence is too nice
Where ends the Virtue, or begins the Vice.
Fools! who from hence into the notion fall,
that Vice or Virtue there is none at all.
If white and black blend, soften, and unite
A thousand ways, is there no black or white?

Essay on Man.

PRINCIPAL WORKS
	Pastorals (in Tonson’s Miscellany) 1708 The Essay on Criticism 1711 Windsor Forest 1713 Rape of the Lock 1714 (first version was 1712) The Iliad 1715-1720 - translation The Works of Shakespear (ed) 1725 The Odyssey 1725-1726 - translation Dunciad Variorum 1729 Essay on Man 1733 Satires and Epistles of Horace 1733-1738 Epistle to Arbuthnot 1735 The Dunciad, in Four Books 1743

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