Even here, it is true, he is a little too consciously virtuous.

Yet when he speaks of his father and mother there are tears in his voice, and it is impossible not to recognize genuine warmth of heart.
Me let the tender office long engage To rock the cradle of reposing age, With lenient arts extend a mother's breath, Make languor smile, and soothe the bed of death, Explore the thought, explain the asking eye, And keep awhile one parent from the sky![8] Such verses are a spring in the desert, a gush of the true feeling, which contrasts with the strained and factitious sentiment in his earlier rhetoric, and almost forces us to love the writer.

Could Pope have preserved that higher mood, he would have held our affections as he often delights our intellect.
Unluckily we can catch but few glimpses of Pope's family life; of the old mother and father and the affectionate nurse, who lived with him till 1721, and died during a dangerous illness of his mother's.

The father, of whom we hear little after his early criticism of the son's bad "rhymes," died in 1717, and a brief note to Martha Blount gives Pope's feeling as fully as many pages: "My poor father died last night.
Believe, since I don't forget you this moment, I never shall." The mother survived till 1733, tenderly watched by Pope, who would never be long absent from her, and whose references to her are uniformly tender and beautiful.

One or two of her letters are preserved.