They are professedly addressed to Pope.

"I write," he says (fragment 65), "to you and for you, and you would think yourself little obliged to me if I took the pains of explaining in prose what you would not think it necessary to explain in verse,"-- that is, the free-will puzzle.

The manuscripts seen by Mallet may probably have been a commonplace book in which Bolingbroke had set down some of these fragments, by way of instructing Pope, and preparing for his own more systematic work.

No reader of the fragments can, I think, doubt as to the immediate source of Pope's inspiration.

Most of the ideas expressed were the common property of many contemporary writers, but Pope accepts the particular modification presented by Bolingbroke.[21] Pope's manipulation of these materials causes much of the Essay on Man to resemble (as Mr.Pattison puts it) an exquisite mosaic work.