speaks of his mother had been so carefully elaborated.

Me let the tender office long engage
To rock the cradle of declining age,
With lenient acts extend a mother's breath,
Make languor smile and smooth the bed of death,
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,
And keep awhile one parent from the sky!

If there are more tender and exquisitely expressed lines in the
language, I know not where to find them; and yet again I should be glad
not to be reminded by a cruel commentator that poor Mrs. Pope had been
dead for two years when they were published, and that even this touching
effusion has therefore a taint of dramatic affectation.

To me, I confess, it seems most probable, though at first sight
incredible, that these utterances were thoroughly sincere for the
moment. I fancy that under Pope's elaborate masks of hypocrisy and
mystification there was a heart always abnormally sensitive.
Unfortunately it was as capable of bitter resentment as of warm
affection, and was always liable to be misled by the suggestions of his
strangely irritable vanity. And this seems to me to give the true key to
Pope's poetical as well as to his personal characteristics.

To explain either, we must remember that he was a man of impulses; at
one instant a mere incarnate thrill of gratitude or generosity, and in
the next of spite or jealousy. A spasm of wounded vanity would make him
for the time as mean and selfish as other men are made by a frenzy of
bodily fear. He would instinctively snatch at a lie even when a moment's
reflection would have shown that the plain truth would be more
convenient, and therefore he had to accumulate lie upon lie, each
intended to patch up some previous blunder. Though nominally the poet of
reason, he was the very antithesis of the man who is reasonable in the
highest sense: who is truthful in word and deed because his conduct is
regulated by harmonious and invariable principles. Pope was governed by
the instantaneous feeling. His emotion came in sudden jets and gushes,
instead of a continuous stream. The same peculiarity deprives his poetry
of continuous harmony or profound unity of conception. His lively sense
of form and proportion enables him indeed to fill up a simple framework
(generally of borrowed design) with an eye to general effect, as in the
Rape of the Lock or the first Dunciad. But even there his flight is
short; and when a poem should be governed by the evolu