se is curiously inaccurate. He was not really in
advance of the best men of his own time; but they, it is to be feared,
were considerably in advance of the average opinion of our own. What may
be said with more plausibility is, that whilst Pope frequently wastes
his skill in gilding refuse, he is really most sensitive to the noblest
sentiments of his contemporaries, and that, when he has good materials
to work upon, his verse glows with unusual fervour, often to sink with
unpleasant rapidity into mere quibbling or epigrammatic pungency. The
real truth is that Pope precisely expresses the position of the best
thinkers of his day. He did not understand the reasoning, but he fully
shared the sentiments of the philosophers among whom Locke and Leibniz
were the great lights. Pope is to the deists and semi-deists of his time
what Milton was to the Puritans or Dante to the Schoolmen. At times he
writes like a Pantheist, and then becomes orthodox, without a
consciousness of the transition; he is a believer in universal
predestination, and saves himself by inconsistent language about
'leaving free the human will;' his views about the origin of society are
an inextricable mass of inconsistency; and he may be quoted in behalf of
doctrines which he, with the help of Warburton, vainly endeavoured to
disavow. But, leaving sound divines to settle the question of his
orthodoxy, and metaphysicians to crush his arguments, if they think it
worth while, we are rather concerned with the general temper in which he
regards the universe, and the moral which he draws for his own
edification. The main doctrine which he enforces is, of course, one of
his usual commonplaces. The statement that 'whatever is, is right,' may
be verbally admitted, and strained to different purposes by half-a-dozen
differing schools. It may be alleged by the cynic, who regards virtue
as an empty name; by the mystic, who is lapped in heavenly contemplation
from the cares of this troublesome world; by the sceptic, whose whole
wisdom is concentrated in the duty of submitting to the inevitable; or
by the man who, abandoning the attempt of solving inscrutable enigmas,
is content to recognise in everything the hand of a Divine ordainer of
all things. Pope, judging him by his most forcible passages, prefers to
insist upon the inevitable ignorance of man in presence of the Infinite:

'Tis but a part we see, and not the whole;

and any effort to pierce the impenetrable gloo