Act of Succession in favor of the House of
Hanover, and the Tories were secretly intriguing with the exiled
Stuarts. Many of the leaders, such as the great Whig champion, John
Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, were without political principle or even
personal honesty. The Church, too, was in a condition of spiritual
deadness. Bishoprics and livings were sold, and given to political
favorites. Clergymen, like Swift and Lawrence Sterne, were worldly in
their lives and immoral in their writings, and were practically
unbelievers. The growing religious skepticism appeared in the Deist
controversy. Numbers of men in high position were Deists; the Earl of
Shaftesbury, for example, and Pope's brilliant friend, Henry St. John,
Lord Bolingbroke, the head of the Tory ministry, whose political
writings had much influence upon his young French acquaintance,
Voltaire. Pope was a Roman Catholic, though there was little to show it
in his writings, and the underlying thought of his famous _Essay on Man_
was furnished him by Bolingbroke. The letters of the cold-hearted
Chesterfield to his son were accepted as a manual of conduct, and La
Rochefoucauld's cynical maxims were quoted as authority on life and
human nature. Said Swift:

As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew
From nature, I believe them true.
They argue no corrupted mind
In him; the fault is in mankind.

The succession which Dryden had willed to Congreve was taken up by
Alexander Pope. He was a man quite unlike Dryden--sickly, deformed,
morbidly precocious, and spiteful; nevertheless he joined on to and
continued Dryden. He was more careful in his literary workmanship than
his great forerunner, and in his _Moral Essays_ and _Satires_ he brought
the Horatian epistle in verse, the formal satire and that species of
didactic poem of which Boileau had given the first example, to an
exquisite perfection of finish and verbal art. Dryden had translated
Vergil, and so Pope translated Homer. The throne of the dunces, which
Dryden had conferred upon Shadwell, Pope, in his _Dunciad_, passed on to
two of his own literary foes, Theobald and Colley Cibber. There is a
great waste of strength in this elaborate squib, and most of the petty
writers, whose names it has preserved, as has been said, like flies in
amber, are now quite unknown. But, although we have to read it with
notes, to get the point of its allusions, it is easy to see what
execution it must have done at the time, and it is im