he constituent and fundamental principle
was good sense, a prompt and intuitive perception of consonance and
propriety. He saw immediately, of his own conceptions, what was to be
chosen, and what to be rejected; and, in the works of others, what was
to be shunned, and what was to be copied.

But good sense alone is a sedate and quiescent quality, which manages
its possessions well, but does not increase them; it collects few
materials for its own operations, and preserves safety, but never gains
supremacy. Pope had, likewise, genius; a mind active, ambitious, and
adventurous, always investigating, always aspiring; in its widest
searches still longing to go forward, in its highest flights still
wishing to be higher; always imagining something greater than it knows,
always endeavouring more than it can do.

To assist these powers, he is said to have had great strength and
exactness of memory. That which he had heard or read was not easily
lost; and he had before him not only what his own meditation suggested,
but what he had found in other writers that might be accommodated to his
present purpose.

These benefits of nature he improved by incessant and unwearied
diligence; he had recourse to every source of intelligence, and lost no
opportunity of information; he consulted the living as well as the dead;
he read his compositions to his friends, and was never content with
mediocrity, when excellence could be attained. He considered poetry as
the business of his life; and, however he might seem to lament his
occupation, he followed it with constancy; to make verses was his first
labour, and to mend them was his last.

From his attention to poetry he was never diverted. If conversation
offered any thing that could be improved, he committed it to paper; if a
thought, or, perhaps, an expression more happy than was common, rose to
his mind, he was careful to write it; an independent distich was
preserved for an opportunity of insertion, and some little fragments
have been found containing lines, or parts of lines, to be wrought upon
at some other time.

He was one of those few whose labour is their pleasure: he was never
elevated to negligence, nor wearied to impatience; he never passed a
fault unamended by indifference, nor quitted it by despair. He laboured
his works, first to gain reputation, and afterwards to keep it.

Of composition there are different methods. Some employ at once memory
and invention, and, with litt