is, I dare laugh out.

But there is no end to the delicate flattery which may be set off
against Pope's ferocious onslaughts upon his enemies. If one could have
a wish for the asking, one could scarcely ask for a more agreeable
sensation than that of being titillated by a man of equal ingenuity in
caressing one's pet vanities. The art of administering such consolation
is possessed only by men who unite such tenderness to an exquisitely
delicate intellect. This vein of genuine feeling sufficiently redeems
Pope's writings from the charge of a commonplace worldliness. Certainly
he is not one of the 'genial' school, whose indiscriminate benevolence
exudes over all that they touch. There is nothing mawkish in his
philanthropy. Pope was, if anything, too good a hater; 'the portentous
cub never forgives,' said Bentley; but kindliness is all the more
impressive when not too widely diffused. Add to this his hearty contempt
for pomposities, humbugs, and stupidities of all kinds, and above all
the fine spirit of independence, in which we have again the real man,
and which expresses itself in such lines as these:

Oh, let me live my own, and die so too!
(To live and die is all I have to do);
Maintain a poet's dignity and ease,
And see what friends and read what books I please.

And we may admit that Pope, in spite of his wig and his stays, his
vanities and his affectations, was in his way as fair an embodiment as
we would expect of that 'plain living and high thinking' of which
Wordsworth regretted the disappearance. The little cripple, diseased in
mind and body, spiteful and occasionally brutal, had in him the spirit
of a man. The monarch of the literary world was far from immaculate; but
he was not without a dignity of his own.

We come, however, to the question, what had Pope to say upon the deepest
subjects with which human beings can concern themselves? The most
explicit answer must be taken from the 'Essay on Man,' and the essay
must be acknowledged to have more conspicuous faults than any of Pope's
writings. The art of reasoning in verse is so difficult that we may
doubt whether it is in any case legitimate, and must acknowledge that it
has been never successfully practised by any English writer. Dryden's
'Religio Laici' may be better reasoning, but it is worse poetry than
Pope's Essay. It is true, again, that Pope's reasoning is intrinsically
feeble. He was no metaphysician, and confined himself to putti