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I. Pope felt intellectually that it was philosophic, and also that it wore an air of nobility, not to despise poverty. Morally, however, he felt inversely: nature and the accidents of his life had made it his necessity to despise nothing so heartily. If in any one sentiment he ever was absolutely sincere, if there can be cited one insulated case upon which he found it difficult to play the hypocrite, it was in the case of that intense scorn with which he regarded poverty, and all the painful circumstances that form the equipage of poverty. To look at a pale, dejected fellow-creature creeping along the highway, and to have reason for thinking that he has not tasted food since yesterday–what a pang would such a sight, accompanied by such a thought, inflict upon many a million of benign human hearts! But in Pope, left to his spontaneous nature, such a sight and such a thought would have moved only fits of laughter. Not that he would have refused the poor creature a shilling, but still he would have laughed. For hunger, and cold, and poverty, appeared to him only in the light of drolleries, and too generally of scoundrelisms. Still he was aware that some caution was requisite in giving public expression to such feelings. Accordingly, when he came forward in gala-dress as a philosopher, he assumed the serene air of one upon whom all such idle distinctions as rich and poor were literally thrown away. But watch him: follow his steps for a few minutes, and the deep realities of his nature will unmask themselves. For example, in the first book of the ‘Dunciad’ he has occasion to mention Dennis:–

‘And all the mighty mad in Dennis raged.’

Upon this line (the 106th) of the text he hangs a note, in the course of which he quotes a few sentences about Dennis from Theobald. One of these begins thus: ‘Did we really know how much this poor man suffers by being contradicted,’ etc. upon which Pope thinks proper to intercalate the following pathetic parenthesis in italics: I wish that reflection on POVERTY had been spared.‘ How amiable! how pretty! Could Joseph Surface have more dexterously improved the occasion: ‘The man that disparages poverty, is a man that–‘ etc. It is manifest, however, at a glance, that this virtuous indignation is altogether misplaced; for ‘poor‘ in the quotation from Theobald has no reference whatever to poverty as the antithesis to wealth. What a pity that a whole phial of such excellent scenical morality should thus have been uncorked and poured out upon the wrong man and the wrong occasion! Really, this unhappy blunder extorts from me as many tears of laughter as ever poverty extorted from Pope. Meantime, reader, watch what follows. Wounded so deeply in his feelings by this constrained homage to poverty, Pope finds himself unable to resettle the equilibrium in his nervous system until he has taken out his revenge by an extra kicking administered to some old mendicant or vagrant lying in a ditch.

At line 106 comes the flourish about Dennis’s poverty. Just nine lines ahead, keeping close as a policeman upon the heels’ of a thief, you come up with Pope in the very act of maltreating Gibber, upon no motive or pretence whatever, small or great, but that he (the said Gibber) was guilty of poverty. Pope had detected him–and this is Pope’s own account of the assault–in an overt act of poverty. He deposes, as if it were an ample justification of his own violence, that Gibber had been caught in the very act–not of supping meanly, coarsely, vulgarly, as upon tripe, for instance, or other offal–but absolutely in the act of not supping at all!

‘Swearing and supperless the hero sate.’

Here one is irresistibly reminded of the old story about the cat who was transformed into a princess: she played the role with admirable decorum, until one day a mouse ran across the floor of the royal saloon, when immediately the old instinct and the hereditary hatred proved too much for the artificial nature, and her highness vanished over a six-barred gate in a furious mouse-chase. Pope, treading in the steps of this model, fancies himself reconciled to poverty. Poverty, however, suddenly presents herself, not as a high poetic abstraction, but in that one of her many shapes which to Pope had always seemed the most comic as well as the most hateful. Instantly Pope’s ancient malice is rekindled; and in line 115 we find him assaulting that very calamity under one name, which under another, at line 106, he had treated with an ostentatious superfluity of indulgence.