uld not have been a very impressive ceremony.

Thus, we are always pursued, in reading Pope, by disagreeable
misgivings. We don't know what comes from the heart, and what from the
lips: when the real man is speaking, and when we are only listening to
old commonplaces skilfully vamped. There is always, if we please, a bad
interpretation to be placed upon his finest sentiments. His indignation
against the vicious is confused with his hatred of personal enemies; he
protests most loudly that he is honest when he is 'equivocating most
genteelly;' his independence may be called selfishness or avarice; his
toleration simple indifference; and even his affection for his friends a
decorous fiction, which will never lead him to the slightest sacrifice
of his own vanity or comfort. A critic of the highest order is provided
with an Ithuriel spear, which discriminates the sham sentiments from the
true. As a banker's clerk can tell a bad coin by its ring on the
counter, without need of a testing apparatus, the true critic can
instinctively estimate the amount of bullion in Pope's epigrammatic
tinsel. But criticism of this kind, as Pope truly says, is as rare as
poetical genius. Humbler writers must be content to take their weights
and measures, or, in other words, to test their first impressions, by
such external evidence as is available. They must proceed cautiously in
these delicate matters, and instead of leaping to the truth by a rapid
intuition, patiently enquire what light is thrown upon Pope's sincerity
by the recorded events of his life, and a careful cross-examination of
the various witnesses to his character. They must, indeed, keep in mind
Mr. Ruskin's excellent canon--that good fruit, even in moralising, can
only be borne by a good tree. Where Pope has succeeded in casting into
enduring form some valuable moral sentiment, we may therefore give him
credit for having at least felt it sincerely. If he did not always act
upon it, the weakness is not peculiar to Pope. Time, indeed, has partly
done the work for us. In Pope, more than in almost any other writer, the
grain has sifted itself from the chaff. The jewels have remained after
the flimsy embroidery in which they were fixed has fallen into decay.
Such a result was natural from his mode of composition. He caught at
some inspiration of the moment; he cast it roughly into form; brooded
over it; retouched it again and again; and when he had brought it to the
very highest polis