How vain that second life in others’ breath,
The ESTATE which wits INHERIT after death;
Ease, health, and life, for this they must resign,
(Unsure the tenure, but how vast the fine!)

          
                                                          Temple of Fame.

he seems to have had present in his mind a single idea of Butler, by which he has very richly amplified the entire imagery.  Butler says,

Honour’s a LEASE for LIVES TO COME,
And cannot be extended from
The LEGAL TENANT.

                                  Hudibras, Part i. c. 3, v. 1043.

The same thought may be found in Sir George Mackenzie’s “Essay on preferring Solitude to public Employment,” first published in 1665:  Hudibras preceded it by two years.  The thought is strongly expressed by the eloquent Mackenzie:  “Fame is a revenue payable only to our ghosts; and to deny ourselves all present satisfaction, or to expose ourselves to so much hazard for this, were as great madness as to starve ourselves, or fight desperately for food, to be laid on our tombs after our death.”

Dryden, in his “Absalom and Achitophel,” says of the Earl of Shaftesbury,

    David for him his tuneful harp had strung,
    And Heaven had wanted one immortal song.

This verse was ringing in the ear of Pope, when with equal modesty and felicity he adopted it in addressing his friend Dr. Arbuthnot.

    Friend of my life; which did not you prolong,
    The world had wanted many an idle song!

Howell has prefixed to his Letters a tedious poem, written in the taste of the times, and he there says of letters, that they are

    The heralds and sweet harbingers that move
    From East to West, on embassies of love;
    They can the tropic cut, and cross the line.

It is probable that Pope had noted this thought, for the following lines seem a beautiful heightening of the idea: 

Heaven first taught letters, for some wretch’s aid,
Some banish’d lover, or some captive maid.

Then he adds, they

Speed the soft intercourse from soul to soul,
And waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole.
Eloisa.

There is another passage in “Howell’s Letters,” which has a great affinity with a thought of Pope, who, in “the Rape of the Lock,” says,

Fair tresses man’s imperial race ensnare,
And beauty draws us with a single hair.

Howell writes, p. 290, “’Tis a powerful sex:—­they were too strong for the first, the strongest and wisest man that was; they must needs be strong, when one hair of a woman can draw more than an hundred pair of oxen.”

Pope’s description of the death of the lamb, in his “Essay on Man,” is finished with the nicest touches, and is one of the finest pictures our poetry exhibits.  Even familiar as it is to our ear, we never examine it but with undiminished admiration.