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II. I have already noticed that some of Pope’s most pointed examples which he presents to you as drawn from his own experience of life, are in fact due to jest-books; and some (offered as facts) are pure coinages of his own brain. When he makes his miser at the last gasp so tenacious of the worldly rights then slipping from his grasp as that he refuses to resign a particular manor, Pope forgot that even a jest-book must govern its jokes by some regard to the realities of life, and that amongst these realities is the very nature and operation of a will. A miser is not, therefore, a fool; and he knows that no possible testamentary abdication of an estate disturbs his own absolute command over it so long as he lives, or bars his power of revoking the bequest. The moral instruction is in this case so poor, that no reader cares much upon what sort of foundation the story itself rests. For such a story a lie may be a decent basis. True; but not so senseless a lie. If the old miser was delirious, there is an end of his responsibilities; and nobody has a right to draw upon him for moral lessons or warnings. If he was not delirirous, the case could not have happened. Modelled in the same spirit are all Pope’s pretended portraitures of women; and the more they ought to have been true, as professing to be studies from life, the more atrociously they are false, and false in the transcendent sense of being impossible. Heaps of contradiction, or of revolting extravagance, do not verify themselves to our loathing incredulity because the artist chooses to come forward with his arms akimbo, saying angrily, ‘But I tell you, sir, these are not fancy-pieces! These ladies whom I have here lampooned are familiarly known to me–they are my particular friends. I see them every day in the undiess of confiding friendship. They betray all their foibles to me in the certainty that I shall take no advantage of their candor; and will you, coming a century later, presume to dispute the fidelity or the value of my contemporary portraits?’ Yes, and upon these two grounds: first (as to the fidelity), that the pretended portraits are delineations of impossible people; and secondly (as to the value), that, if after all they could be sworn to as copies faithful to the originals, not the less are they to be repelled as abnormal, and so far beyond the intelligibilities of nature as practically to mean nothing, neither teaching nor warning. The two Duchesses of Marlborough, for instance, Sarah and Henrietta, are atrocious caricatures, and constructed on the desperate principle of catching at a momentary stare or grin, by means of anarchy in the features imputed, and truculent antithesis in the expression. Who does not feel that these are the fierce pasquinades, and the coarse pasquinades, of some malignant electioneering contest? Is there a line that breathes the simplicity and single-heartedness of truth? Equal disgust settles upon every word that Pope ever wrote against Lady Mary W. Montagu. Having once come to hate her rancorously, and finding his hatred envenomed by the consciousness that Lady Mary had long ceased to care two straws for all the malice of all the wits in Christendom, Pope labored at his own spite, filing it and burnishing it as a hand-polisher works at the the blade of a scymitar. For years he had forgotten to ask after the realities of nature as they existed in Lady Mary, and considered only what had the best chance of stinging her profoundly. He looked out for a ‘raw’ into which he might lay the lash; not seeking it in the real woman, but generally in the nature and sensibilities of abstract woman. Whatever seemed to disfigure the idea of womanhood, that, by reiterated touches, he worked into his portraits of Lady Mary; and at length, no doubt, he had altogether obliterated from his own remembrance the true features of her whom he so much detested. On this class of Pope’s satiric sketches I do not, however, wish to linger, having heretofore examined some of the more prominent cases with close attention.