5 Sceptic one who doubts the possibility of any
knowledge.
6 Stoic’s pride The Stoic takes pride in the capacity of
human reason to subdue the passions and to rise
above the accidents of fortune.
20 weigh air These lines (20–3) refer to actual
experiments and discoveries being made in Pope’s
time by Boyle, Halley, Newton, and others.
23 empyreal sphere the outermost sphere of the universe,
abode of God and of Plato’s forms or ideas (the first
good, etc.).
25 his followers the neo-Platonists.
34 Newton Isaac Newton (1642–1729), President of the
Royal Society and the greatest natural scientist of his
day, famous for his laws of motion and his work on
the principle of gravity.
from the third epistleThe extracts are lines 7–26, 169–98, and 283–302.
55 Relumed made clear or bright again.
from the fourth epistleThe extract is from line 373 to the end.
1 my friend Bolingbroke: compare the ‘Imitation of
Horace’ addressed to him, line 177.
EPISTLE TO A LADY. OF THE CHARACTERS OF WOMEN(1735) In volume two of the Works of the same year it was
grouped with ‘To Cobham’, ‘To Bathurst’ and ‘To Burlington’
as the second of the ‘Ethic Epistles, the Second Book’. In the
revision of his works that Pope was working on at the end of
his life, these became the Epistles to Several Persons. In the
posthumous edition of Warburton the four epistles are first
called The Moral Essays. The characters of Chloe, Philomede,