ometimes pleased, with the natural emotions
of common men.

His scorn of the great is too often repeated to be real; no man thinks
much of that which he despises; and, as falsehood is always in danger of
inconsistency, he makes it his boast, at another time, that he lives
among them.

It is evident that his own importance swells often in his mind. He is
afraid of writing, lest the clerks of the post-office should know his
secrets; he has many enemies; he considers himself as surrounded by
universal jealousy: "after many deaths, and many dispersions, two or
three of us" says he, "may still be brought together, not to plot, but
to divert ourselves, and the world too, if it pleases:" and they can
live together, and "show what friends wits may be, in spite of all the
fools in the world." All this while it was likely that the clerks did
not know his hand; he certainly had no more enemies than a publick
character like his inevitably excites; and with what degree of
friendship the wits might live, very few were so much fools as ever to
inquire.

Some part of this pretended discontent he learned from Swift, and
expresses it, I think, most frequently in his correspondence with him.
Swift's resentment was unreasonable, but it was sincere; Pope's was the
mere mimickry of his friend, a fictitious part which he began to play
before it became him. When he was only twenty-five years old, he related
that "a glut of study and retirement had thrown him on the world," and
that there was danger lest "a glut of the world should throw him back
upon study and retirement." To this Swift answered with great propriety,
that Pope had not yet either acted or suffered enough in the world to
have become weary of it. And, indeed, it must be some very powerful
reason that can drive back to solitude him who has once enjoyed the
pleasures of society.

In the letters, both of Swift and Pope, there appears such narrowness of
mind, as makes them insensible of any excellence that has not some
affinity with their own, and confines their esteem and approbation to so
small a number, that whoever should form his opinion of the age from
their representation, would suppose them to have lived amidst ignorance
and barbarity, unable to find, among their contemporaries, either virtue
or intelligence, and persecuted by those that could not understand them.

When Pope murmurs at the world, when he professes contempt of fame, when
he speaks of riches and poverty,