At last it is -


"Who but must laugh if such a man there he?
Who would not weep if Atticus were he?"


He was at this time at open war with Lord Hervey, who had
distinguished himself as a steady adherent to the ministry, and
being offended with a contemptuous answer to one of his pamphlets,
had summoned Pulteney to a duel. Whether he or Pope made the first
attack perhaps cannot now be easily known. He had written an
invective against Pope, whom he calls, "Hard as thy heart, and as
thy birth obscure;" and hints that his father was a hatter. To this
Pope wrote a reply in verse and prose. The verses are in this poem,
and the prose, though it was never sent, is printed among his
letters; but to a cool reader of the present time exhibits nothing
but tedious malignity.

His last "Satires" of the general kind, were two Dialogues, named,
from the year in which they were published, "Seventeen hundred and
thirty-eight." In these poems many are praised and many reproached.
Pope was then entangled in the opposition, a follower of the Prince
of Wales, who dined at his house, and the friend of many who
obstructed and censured the conduct of the ministers. His political
partiality was too plainly shown; he forgot the prudence with which
he passed, in his earlier years, uninjured and unoffending, through
much more violent conflicts of faction. In the first Dialogue,