The six last lines are the best, but not excellent.

The rest of his sepulchral performances hardly deserve the notice of
criticism. The contemptible Dialogue between He and She should have been
suppressed for the author's sake.

In his last epitaph on himself, in which he attempts to be jocular upon
one of the few things that make wise men serious, he confounds the
living man with the dead:

Under this stone, or under this sill,
Or under this turf, &c.

When a man is once buried, the question, under what he is buried, is
easily decided. He forgot that though he wrote the epitaph in a state of
uncertainty, yet it could not be laid over him till his grave was made.
Such is the folly of wit when it is ill employed.

The world has but little new; even this wretchedness seems to have been
borrowed from the following tuneless lines:

Ludovici Areosti humantur ossa
Sub hoc marmore, vel sub hac humo, seu
Sub quicquid voluit benignus haeres,
Sive haerede benignior comes, seu
Opportunius incidens viator;
Nam scire haud potuit futura, sed nec
Tanti erat vacuum sibi cadaver
Ut urnam cuperet parare vivens;
Vivens ista tamen sibi paravit,
Quae inscribi voluit suo sepulchro
Olim siquod haberet is sepulchrum.

Surely Ariosto did not venture to expect that his trifle would have ever
had such an illustrious imitator.

-----

[Footnote 108: This weakness was so great that he constantly wore stays,
as I have been assured by a waterman at Twickenham, who, in lifting him
into his boat, had often felt them. His method of taking the air on the
water was to have a sedan chair in the boat, in which he sat with the
glasses down. H.]

[Footnote 109: This opinion is warmly controverted by Roscoe, in his
Life of Pope; and, perhaps, with justice; for, to adopt the words of
D'Israeli, "Pope's literary warfare was really the wars of his poetical
ambition more, perhaps, than of the petulance and strong irritability of
his temper." See also sir Walter Scott's Swift, i. 316. ED.]

[Footnote 110: This is incorrect; his ordinary hand was certainly neat
and elegant. I have some of it now before me. M.]

[Footnote 111: Pope's first instructor is repeatedly mentioned by Spence
under the name of Banister, and described as the family priest. Spence's
Anecd. 259. 283. Singer's edit. Roscoe's Pope, i. 11. ED.]

[Footnote 112: Dryden died May 1, 1700, a year earlier than Johnson
supposed. M