opinions can be best exhibited by quoting a
few passages from his book, not consecutive, but taken here and there as
best suits the purpose.

"The sublime and the pathetic are the two chief nerves of all genuine
poesy. What is there transcendently sublime or pathetic in Pope?. . .
He early left the more poetical provinces of his art, to become a moral,
didactic, and satiric poet. . . And because I am, perhaps, unwilling to
speak out in plain English, I will adopt the following passage of
Voltaire, which, in my opinion, as exactly characteristizes Pope as it
does his model, Boileau, for whom it was originally designed. 'Incapable
peut-etre du sublime qui eleve l'ame, et du sentiment qui l'attendrit,
mais fait pour eclairer ceux a qui la nature accorda l'un et l'autre;
laborieux, severe, precis, pur, harmonieux, il devint enfin le poete de
la Raison.'. . . A clear head and acute understanding are not sufficient
alone to make a poet; the most solid observations on human life,
expressed with the utmost elegance and brevity, are morality and not
poetry. . . It is a creative and glowing imagination, _acer spiritus ac
vis_, and that alone, that can stamp a writer with this exalted and very
uncommon character."

Warton believes that Pope's projected epic on Brutus, the legendary found
of Britain, "would have more resembled the 'Henriade' than the 'Iliad,'
or even the 'Gierusalemme Liberata'; that it would have appeared (if this
scheme had been executed) how much, and for what reasons, the man that is
skillful in painting modern life, and the most secret foibles and follies
of his contemporaries, is, THEREFORE, disqualified for representing the
ages of heroism, and that simple life which alone epic poetry can
gracefully describe. . . Wit and satire are transitory and perishable,
but nature and passion are eternal." The largest portion of Pope's work,
says the author's closing summary, "is of the didactic, moral, and
satiric kind; and consequently not of the most poetic species of poetry;
when it is manifest that good sense and judgment were his
characteristical excellencies, rather than fancy and invention. . . He
stuck to describing modern manners; but those manners, because they are
familiar, uniform, artificial, and polished, are in their very nature,
unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse. He gradually became one of the
most correct, even, and exact poets that ever wrote. . . Whatever
poetical enthusiasm he actua