But when he goes on to say that he "can sleep without a poem in his head, Nor know if Dennis be alive or dead," we remember his calling up the maid four times a night in the dreadful winter of 1740 to save a thought, and the features writhing in anguish as he read a hostile pamphlet.

Presently he informs us that "he thinks a lie in prose or verse the same"-- only too much the same! and that "if he pleased, he pleased by manly ways." Alas! for the manliness.

And yet again when he speaks of his parents, Unspotted names and venerable long If there be force in virtue or in song, can we doubt that he is speaking from the heart?
We should perhaps like to forget that the really exquisite and touching lines in which he speaks of his mother had been so carefully elaborated.
Me let the tender office long engage To rock the cradle of declining age, With lenient acts extend a mother's breath, Make languor smile and smooth the bed of death, Explore the thought, explain the asking eye, And keep awhile one parent from the sky! If there are more tender and exquisitely expressed lines in the language, I know not where to find them; and yet again I should be glad not to be reminded by a cruel commentator that poor Mrs.Pope had been dead for two years when they were published, and that even this touching effusion has therefore a taint of dramatic affectation.
To me, I confess, it seems most probable, though at first sight incredible, that these utterances were thoroughly sincere for the moment.

I fancy that under Pope's elaborate masks of hypocrisy and mystification there was a heart always abnormally sensitive.
Unfortunately it was as capable of bitter resentment as of warm affection, and was always liable to be misled by the suggestions of his strangely irritable vanity.

And this seems to me to give the true key to Pope's poetical as well as to his personal characteristics.
To explain either, we must remember that he was a man of impulses; at one instant a mere incarnate thrill of gratitude or generosity, and in the next of spite or jealousy.