Whilst his lordship is running after a cart, Pope snatches a moment to tell how the day before this noble farmer had engaged a painter for 200_l._ to give the correct agricultural air to his country hall by ornamenting it with trophies of spades, rakes, and prongs.

Pope saw that the zeal for retirement was not free from affectation, but he sat at the teacher's feet with profound belief in the value of the lessons which flowed from his lips.
The connexion was to bear remarkable fruit.

Under the direction of Bolingbroke, Pope resolved to compose a great philosophical poem.

"Does Pope talk to you," says Bolingbroke to Swift in 1731, "of the noble work which, at my instigation, he has begun in such a manner that he must be convinced by this time I judged better of his talents than he did ?" And Bolingbroke proceeds to describe the Essay on Man, of which it seems that three (out of four) epistles were now finished.

The first of these epistles appeared in 1733.