therefore please, if not by favouring them, by forbearing to oppose them. To charge thofe favourable reprefentations, which every man gives of himself, with the guilt of hypocritical falfhood, would fhew more severity than knowledge. The writer commonly believes himself. Almost every man's thoughts, while they are general, are right; and moft hearts are pure, while temptation is away. It is easy to awaken generous fentiments in privacy; to defpife death when there is no danger; to glow with benevolence when there is nothing to be given. While fuch ideas are formed they are felt, and felf-love does not fufpect the gleam of virtue to be the meteor of fancy.

If the Letters of Pope are confidered merely as compofitions, they feem to be premeditated and artificial. It is one thing to write because there is fomething which the mind wishes to dif charge, and another, to folicit the imagination becaufe ceremony or vanity requires fomething to be written. Pope confeffes his early Letters to be vitiated with affectation and ambition: to know whether he difentangled himself from thefe perverters of epiftolary integrity, his book and his life muft be fet in comparison.

One of his favourite topicks is contempt of his own poetry. For this, if it had been real, he would deserve no commendation, and in this he was е certainly

certainly not fincere; for his high value of himself was fufficiently observed, and of what could he be proud but of his poetry? He writes, he fays, when he bas juft nothing else to do; yet Swift complains that he was never at leisure for converfation, because he had always fome poetical fcheme in his head. It was punctually required that his writing-box fhould be fet upon his bed before he rofe; and Lord Oxford's domestick reJated, that, in the dreadful winter of Forty, he was called from her bed by him four times in one night, to fupply him with paper, left he fhould lose a thought.

He pretends infenfibility to cenfure and criticism, though it was obferved by

all

all who knew him that every pamphlet disturbed his quiet, and that his extreme irritability laid him open to perpetual vexation; but he wished to despise his criticks, and therefore hoped that he did defpife them.

As he happened to live in two reigns when the Court paid little attention to poetry, the nursed in his mind a foolish difefteem of Kings, and proclaims that be never fees Courts. Yet a little regard fhewn him by the Prince of Wales melted his obduracy; and he had not much to say when he was afked by his Royal Highness, how he could love a Prince while he difliked Kings?

He very frequently profeffes contempt of the world, and reprefents himself

as looking on mankind, fometimes with gay indifference, as on emmets of a hil lock, below his ferious attention; and fometimes with gloomy indignation, as on monsters more worthy of hatred than of pity. These were difpofitions apparently counterfeited. How could he despise those whom he lived by pleafing, and on whofe approbation his esteem of himself was fuperftructed? Why should he hate thofe to whofe favour he owed his honour and his eafe? Of things that terminate in human life, the world is the proper judge; to defpife its fentence, if it were poffible, is not just; and if it were juft, is not poffible. Pope was far enough from this unreasonable temper; he was fufficiently a fool to

Fame,