ABSTRACT
To Alexander Pope charity was the embodiment of "social love" or concern for others, which, in the divine scheme of things, balanced "self-love" or concern for one's own well-being. Pope addressed Epistle III of his "Moral Essays" to his long-time and long-lived friend Allen Apsley, Lord Bathurst, who, although several years older than Pope, outlived him by thirty years, mingling "freely in society till past ninety, [and] living to walk in the shade of lofty trees he and Pope had planted." In "New Morality" Canning and Frere distinguished between British charity, "who dries/The orphan's tears, and wipes the widow's eyes," and "French Philanthropy," whose "baneful sway" subverts patriotism and undermines morality. Percy Bysshe Shelley, an infant during the French Revolution, carded the spirit of "republican enthusiasm and universal philanthropy" into the nineteenth century. In the introduction to Prometheus Unbound he acknowledged that he had a passion to reform the world.
