,
Bare the mean heart that lurks beneath a star.

For the moment he takes himself seriously; and, indeed, he seems to have
persuaded both himself and his friends that he was really a great
defender of virtue. Arbuthnot begged him, almost with his dying breath,
to continue his "noble disdain and abhorrence of vice," and, with a due
regard to his own safety, to try rather to reform than chastise; and
Pope accepts the office ostentatiously. His provocation is "the strong
antipathy of good to bad," and he exclaims,--

Yes! I am proud--I must be proud to see
Men not afraid of God, afraid of me.
Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne,
Yet touch'd and shamed by ridicule alone.

If the sentiment provokes a slight incredulity, it is yet worth while
to understand its real meaning; and the explanation is not very far to
seek.

Pope's best writing, I have said, is the essence of conversation. It has
the quick movement, the boldness and brilliance, which we suppose to be
the attributes of the best talk. Of course the apparent facility is due
to conscientious labour. In the Prologue and Epilogue and the best parts
of the imitations of Horace, he shows such consummate mastery of his
peculiar style, that we forget the monotonous metre. The opening
passage, for example, of the Prologue is written apparently with the
perfect freedom of real dialogue; in fact, it is of course far more
pointed and compressed than any dialogue could ever be. The dramatic
vivacity with which the whole scene is given, shows that he could use
metre as the most skilful performer could command a musical instrument.
Pope, indeed, shows in the Essay on Criticism, that his view about the
uniformity of sound and sense were crude enough; they are analogous to
the tricks by which a musician might decently imitate the cries of
animals or the murmurs of a crowd; and his art excludes any attempt at
rivalling the melody of the great poets who aim at producing a harmony
quite independent of the direct meaning of their words. I am only
speaking of the felicity with which he can move in metre, without the
slightest appearance of restraint, so as to give a kind of idealized
representation of the tone of animated verbal intercourse. Whatever
comes within this province he can produce with admirable fidelity. Now
in such talks as we imagine with Swift and Bolingbroke, we may be quite
sure that there would be some very forcible denunciation of