his excellencies has likewise faults, and faults
sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit. I shall shew them in
the proportion in which they appear to me, without envious malignity or
superstitious veneration. No question can be more innocently discussed
than a dead poet's pretensions to renown; and little regard is due to that
bigotry which sets candour higher than truth.

His first defect is that to which may be imputed most of the evil in books
or in men. He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more
careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any
moral purpose. From his writings indeed a system of social duty may be
selected, for he that thinks reasonably must think morally; but his
precepts and axioms drop casually from him; he makes no just distribution
of good or evil, nor is always careful to shew in the virtuous a
disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons indifferently through
right and wrong, and at the close dismisses them without further care, and
leaves their examples to operate by chance. This fault the barbarity of
his age cannot extenuate; for it is always a writer's duty to make the
world better, and justice is a virtue independent on time or place.

The plots are often so loosely formed, that a very slight consideration
may improve them, and so carelessly pursued, that he seems not always
fully to comprehend his own design. He omits opportunities of instructing
or delighting, which the train of his story seems to force upon him, and
apparently rejects those exhibitions which would be more affecting, for
the sake of those which are more easy.

It may be observed that in many of his plays the latter part is evidently
neglected. When he found himself near the end of his work, and in view of
his reward, he shortened the labour to snatch the profit. He therefore
remits his efforts where he should most vigorously exert them, and his
catastrophe is improbably produced or imperfectly represented.

He had no regard to distinction of time or place, but gives to one age or
nation, without scruple, the customs, institutions, and opinions of
another, at the expence not only of likelihood, but of possibility. These
faults Pope has endeavoured, with more zeal than judgment, to transfer to
his imagined interpolators. We need not wonder to find Hector quoting
Aristotle, when we see the loves of Theseus and Hippolyta combined with
the Gothick mythology of fairies