To Paraclete's white walls and silver springs," &c.

The Essay on Man is not Pope's best work. It is a theory which
Bolingbroke is supposed to have given him, and which he expanded into
verse. But "he spins the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple
of his argument." All that he says, "the very words, and to the
self-same tune," would prove just as well that whatever is, is _wrong_,
as that whatever is, is _right_. The Dunciad has splendid passages, but
in general it is dull, heavy, and mechanical. The sarcasm already quoted
on Settle, the Lord Mayor's poet, (for at that time there was a city as
well as a court poet)

"Now night descending, the proud scene is o'er,
But lives in Settle's numbers one day more"--

is the finest inversion of immortality conceivable. It is even better
than his serious apostrophe to the great heirs of glory, the triumphant
bards of antiquity!

The finest burst of severe moral invective in all Pope, is the
prophetical conclusion of the epilogue to the Satires:

"Virtue may chuse the high or low degree,
'Tis just alike to virtue, and to me;
Dwell in a monk, or light upon a king,
She's still the same belov'd, contented thing.
Vice is undone if she forgets her birth,
And stoops from angels to the dregs of earth.
But 'tis the Fall degrades her to a whore:
Let Greatness own her, and she's mean no more.