mon sense of mankind, who,
without any regular process of reflection, judge of the merit of a work,
not more by its inherent and absolute worth, than by its originality and
capacity of gratifying a different faculty of the mind, or a different
class of readers; for it should be recollected, that there may be
readers (as well as poets) not of the highest class, though very good
sort of people, and not altogether to be despised.

The question, whether Pope was a poet, has hardly yet been settled,
and is hardly worth settling; for if he was not a great poet, he must
have been a great prose-writer, that is, he was a great writer of some
sort. He was a man of exquisite faculties, and of the most refined
taste; and as he chose verse (the most obvious distinction of poetry) as
the vehicle to express his ideas, he has generally passed for a poet,
and a good one. If, indeed, by a great poet, we mean one who gives the
utmost grandeur to our conceptions of nature, or the utmost force to the
passions of the heart, Pope was not in this sense a great poet; for the
bent, the characteristic power of his mind, lay the clean contrary way;
namely, in representing things as they appear to the indifferent
observer, stripped of prejudice and passion, as in his Critical Essays;
or in representing them in the most contemptible and insignificant point
of view, as in his Satires; or in clothing the little with mock-dignity,
as in his poems of Fancy; or in adorning the trivial incidents and
familiar relations of life with the utmost elegance of expression, and
all the flattering illusions of friendship or self-love, as in his
Epistles. He was not then distinguished as a poet of lofty enthusiasm,
of strong imagination, with a passionate sense of the beauties of
nature, or a deep insight into the workings of the heart; but he was a
wit, and a critic, a man of sense, of observation, and the world, with a
keen relish for the elegances of art, or of nature when embellished by
art, a quick tact for propriety of thought and manners as established by
the forms and customs of society, a refined sympathy with the sentiments
and habitudes of human life, as he felt them within the little circle of
his family and friends. He was, in a word, the poet, not of nature, but
of art; and the distinction between the two, as well as I can make it
out, is this--The poet of nature is one who, from the elements of
beauty, of power, and of passion in his own breast, sy