Bright clear common sense was for once having its own way, and tyrannizing over the faculties from which it too often suffers violence.

The favoured faculty never doubted its own qualification for supremacy in every department.

In metaphysics it was triumphing with Hobbes and Locke over the remnants of scholasticism; under Tillotson, it was expelling mystery from religion; and in art it was declaring war against the extravagant, the romantic, the mystic, and the Gothic,--a word then used as a simple term of abuse.

Wit and sense are but different avatars of the same spirit; wit was the form in which it showed itself in coffee-houses, and sense that in which it appeared in the pulpit or parliament.

When Walsh told Pope to be correct, he was virtually advising him to carry the same spirit into poetry.