e to a depressed Church chiefly
because he could not bear to give pain to the parents whom he loved with
an exquisite tenderness. Granting that he would not have had much chance
of winning tangible rewards by the baseness of a desertion, he at least
recognised his true position; and instead of being soured by his
exclusion from the general competition, or wasting his life in frivolous
regrets, he preserved a spirit of tolerance and independence, and had a
full right to the boasts in which he certainly indulged a little too
freely:--

Not Fortune's worshipper, nor Fashion's fool,
Not Lucre's madman, nor Ambition's tool;
Not proud, nor servile--be one poet's praise
That, if he pleased, he pleased by manly ways;
That flattery, even to kings, he held a shame,
And thought a lie in prose or verse the same.

Admitting that the last line suggests a slight qualm, the portrait
suggested in the rest is about as faithful as one can expect a man to
paint from himself.

And hence we come to the question, what was the morality which Pope
dispensed from this exalted position? Admitting his independence, can we
listen to him patiently when he proclaims himself to be

Of virtue only, and her friends, the friend;

or when he boasts in verses noble if quite sincere--

Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see
Men not afraid of God, afraid of me;
Safe from the Bar, the Pulpit, and the Throne,
Yet touched and shamed by ridicule alone.

Is this guardian of virtue quite immaculate, and the morality which he
preaches quite of the most elevated kind? We must admit, of course, that
he does not sound the depths, or soar to the heights, in which men of
loftier genius are at home. He is not a mystic, but a man of the world.
He never, as we have already said, quits the sphere of ordinary and
rather obvious maxims about the daily life of society, or quits it at
his peril. His independence is not like Milton's, that of an ancient
prophet, consoling himself by celestial visions for a world given over
to baseness and frivolity; nor like Shelley's, that of a vehement
revolutionist, who has declared open war against the existing order; it
is the independence of a modern gentleman, with a competent fortune,
enjoying a time of political and religious calm. And therefore his
morality is in the main the expression of the conclusions reached by
supreme good sense, or, as he puts it,

Good sense, which on