self-love does not suspect the gleam of virtue to be the meteor of
fancy.

"If the letters of Pope are considered merely as compositions, they seem
to be premeditated and artificial. It is one thing to write, because
there is something which the mind wishes to discharge; and another to
solicit the imagination, because ceremony or vanity requires something
to be written. Pope confesses his early letters to be vitiated with
_affectation and ambition_. To know whether he disentangles himself
from these perverters of epistolary integrity, his book and his life
must be set in comparison. One of his favourite topics is contempt of
his own poetry. For this, if it had been real, he would deserve no
commendation; and in this he was certainly not sincere, for his high
value of himself was sufficiently observed; and of what could he be
proud but of his poetry? He writes, he says, when 'he has just nothing
else to do,' yet Swift complains that he was never at leisure for
conversation, because he 'had always some poetical scheme in his head.'
It was punctually required that his writing-box should be set upon his
bed before he rose; and Lord Oxford's domestic related that, in the
dreadful winter of '40, she was called from her bed by him four times in
one night, to supply him with paper lest he should lose a thought.

"He pretends insensibility to censure and criticism, though it was
observed by all who knew him that every pamphlet disturbed his quiet,
and that his extreme irritability laid him open to perpetual vexation;
but he wished to despise his critics, and therefore hoped he did despise
them. As he happened to live in two reigns when the court paid little
attention to poetry, he nursed in his mind a foolish disesteem of kings,
and proclaims that 'he never sees courts.' Yet a little regard shown him
by the Prince of Wales melted his obduracy; and he had not much to say