Between the happier passages we have to cross stretches of flat prose twisted into rhyme; Pope seems to have intentionally pitched his style at a prosaic level as fitter for didactic purposes; but besides this we here and there come upon phrases which are not only elliptical and slovenly, but defy all grammatical construction.

This was a blemish to which Pope was always strangely liable.

It was perhaps due in part to over-correction, when the context was forgotten and the subject had lost its freshness.
Critics, again, have remarked upon the poverty of the rhymes, and observed that he makes ten rhymes to "wit" and twelve to "sense." The frequent recurrence of the words is the more awkward because they are curiously ambiguous.

"Wit" was beginning to receive its modern meaning; but Pope uses it vaguely as sometimes equivalent to intelligence in general, sometimes to the poetic faculty, and sometimes to the erratic fancy, which the true poet restrains by sense.

Pope would have been still more puzzled if asked to define precisely what he meant by the antithesis between nature and art.