wandering lovers brings
To Paraclete's white walls and silver springs," etc.

The Essay on Man is not Pope's best work. It is a theory which Bolingbroke
is supposed to have given him, and which he expanded into verse. But "he
spins the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument."
All that he says, "the very words, and to the self-same tune," would prove
just as well that whatever is, is _wrong_, as that whatever is, is
_right_. The Dunciad has splendid passages, but in general it is dull,
heavy, and mechanical. The sarcasm already quoted on Settle, the Lord
Mayor's poet, (for at that time there was a city as well as a court poet)

"Now night descending, the proud scene is o'er,
But lives in Settle's numbers one day more"--

is the finest inversion of immortality conceivable. It is even better than
his serious apostrophe to the great heirs of glory, the triumphant bards
of antiquity!

The finest burst of severe moral invective in all Pope, is the prophetical
conclusion of the epilogue to the Satires:

"Virtue may chuse the high or low degree,
'Tis just alike to virtue, and to me;
Dwell in a monk, or light upon a king,
She's still the same belov'd, contented thing.
Vice is undone if she forgets her birth,
And stoops from angels to the dregs of earth.
But 'tis the Fall degrades her to a whore:
Let Greatness own her, and she's mean no more.
Her birth, her beauty, crowds and courts confess,
Chaste matrons praise her, and grave bishops bless;
In golden chains the willing world she draws,
And hers the gospel is, and hers the laws;
Mounts the tribunal, lifts her scarlet head,
And sees pale Virtue carted in her stead.
Lo! at the wheels of her triumphal car,
Old England's Genius, rough with many a scar,
Dragged in the dust! his arms hang idly round,
His flag inverted trails along the ground!
Our youth, all livery'd o'er with foreign gold,
Before her dance; behind her, crawl the old!
See thronging millions to the Pagod run,
And offer country, parent, wife, or son!
Hear her black trumpet through the land proclaim,
That _not to be corrupted is the shame_.
In soldier, churchman, patriot, man in pow'r,
'Tis av'rice all, ambition is no more!
See all our nobles begging to be slaves!
See all our fools aspiring to be knaves!
The wit of cheats, the courage of a whore,
Are what ten thousand envy and adore:
All, all look up with reverentia