lasted his time. Dryden was a papist by apostacy; and
perhaps, not to speak uncharitably, upon some bias from self-interest.
Pope, on the other hand, was a Papist by birth, and by a tie of honour;
and he resisted all temptations to desert his afflicted faith, which
temptations lay in bribes of great magnitude prospectively, and in
persecutions for the present that were painfully humiliating. How base a
time-server does Dryden appear on the one side! on the other, how much
of a martyr should we be disposed to pronounce Pope! And yet, for all
that, such is the overruling force of a nature originally sincere, the
apostate Dryden wore upon his brow the grace of sincerity, whilst the
pseudo-martyr Pope, in the midst of actual fidelity to his church, was
at his heart a traitor--in the very oath of his allegiance to his
spiritual mistress had a lie upon his lips, scoffed at her while
kneeling in homage to her pretensions, and secretly forswore her
doctrines while suffering insults in her service.

The differences as to truth and falsehood lay exactly where by all the
external symptoms they ought _not_ to have lain. But the reason for this
anomaly was that to Dryden sincerity had been a perpetual necessity of
his intellectual nature, whilst Pope, distracted by his own activities
of mind, living in an irreligious generation, and beset by infidel
friends, had early lost his anchorage of traditional belief; and yet,
upon honourable scruple of fidelity to the suffering Church of his
fathers, he sought often to dissemble the fact of his own scepticism,
which often he thirsted ostentatiously to parade. Through a motive of
truthfulness he became false. And in this particular instance he would,
at any rate, have become false, whatever had been the native
constitution of his mind. It was a mere impossibility to reconcile any
real allegiance to his church with his known irreverence to religion.
But upon far more subjects than this Pope was habitually false to the
quality of his thoughts, always insincere, never by any accident in
earnest, and consequently many times caught in ruinous self-contradiction.
Is that the sort of writer to furnish an advantageous study for the
precious leisure, precious as rubies, of the toil-worn artisan.

The root and pledge of this falseness in Pope lay in a disease of his
mind, which he (like the Roman poet Horace) mistook for a feature of
praeter-natural strength; and this disease was the incapacity of
se