These are the essential merits of good declamation, and it is in the true declamatory passages that Pope is at his best.

The speeches of his heroes are often admirable, full of spirit, well balanced and skilfully arranged pieces of rhetoric--not a mere inorganic series of observations.

Undoubtedly the warriors are a little too epigrammatic and too consciously didactic; and we feel almost scandalized when they take to downright blows, as though Walpole and St.John were interrupting a debate in the House of Commons by fisticuffs.

They would be better in the senate than the field.

But the brilliant rhetoric implies also a sense of dignity which is not mere artificial mouthing.