While he sought,
with the fury of a pampered slave, to trample on those authors that were
beneath him in rank or in popularity, he could on all occasions fawn
with the sycophancy of a eunuch upon the noble, the rich, and the
powerful. Hazlitt speaks of Moore as a "pug-dog barking from the lap of
a lady of quality at inferior passengers." The description is far more
applicable to Pope. We have much allowance to make for the influence
exerted on his mind by his singularly crooked frame and sickly habit of
body, by his position as belonging to a proscribed faith, and by his
want of training in a public school; but after all these deductions, we
cannot but deplore the spectacle of one of the finest, clearest, and
sharpest minds that England ever produced, so frequently reminding you
of a bright sting set in the body, and steeped in the venom, of a wasp.
And yet, withal, he possessed many virtues, which endeared him to a
multitude of friends. He was a kind son. He was a faithful and devoted
friend. He loved, if not _man_, yet many men with deep tenderness. A
keen politician he was not; but, so far as he went along with his party,
he was true to the common cause. In morals, he was greatly superior, in
point of external decorum, to most of the wits of the time; but in
falsehood, finesse, treachery, and envy, he stood at the bottom of the
list, without that plea of poverty, or wretchedness, or despair, which
so many of them might have urged.
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