dreadful winter of Forty, 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 that 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 when he was
asked by his Royal Highness, "How he could love a prince while he
disliked kings?"

He very frequently professes contempt of the world, and represents
himself as looking on mankind, sometimes with gay indifference, as
on emmets of a hillock, below his serious attention; and sometimes
with gloomy indignation, as on monsters more worthy of hatred than
pity. These were dispositions apparently counterfeited. How could
he despise those whom he lived by pleasing, and on whose approbation
his esteem of himself was superstructed? Why should he hate those
to whose favour he owed his honour and his ease? Of things that
terminate in human life, the world is the proper judge: to despise
its sentence, if it were possible, is not just; and if it were just,
is not possible. Pope was far enough from this unreasonable temper;
he was sufficiently A FOOL TO FAME, and his fault was that he
pretended to neglect it. His levity and his sullenness were only in
his letters; he passed through common life, sometimes vexed, and
sometimes pleased, with the natural emotions of common men. His
scorn of the great is repeated too often to be real; no man thinks