Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“There mark what Ills the Scholar's Life assail; Toil, Envy, Want, the Garret, and the Jail.”
- Date
- 1749
Meaning of “There mark what Ills the Scholar's Life assail;…”
The poem refuses to romanticize scholarship by listing labor, envy, poverty and danger among the possible companions of intellectual ambition.
Where does it come from?
The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), first-edition scholar passage, Wikisource scan leaf 28. “There mark what Ills the Scholar’s Life assail” is followed by “Toil, Envy, Want, the Garret, and the Jail.” The first-edition transcription uses a comma after “assail”; this collection’s semicolon is a retained punctuation normalization. The couplet remains satirical literary context rather than a forecast of every scholar’s life.
