If Pope had taken to heart some of St.Paul's exhortations to Christian charity, he would scarcely have published his lines upon Addison, and English literature would have lost some of its most brilliant pages.
Satire of the kind represented by those lines was so obviously adapted to Pope's peculiar talent, that we rather wonder at his having taken to it seriously at a comparatively late period, and even then having drifted into it by accident rather than by deliberate adoption.

He had aimed, as has been said, at being a philosophic and didactic poet.

The Essay on Man formed part of a much larger plan, of which two or three fragmentary sketches are given by Spence.[24] Bolingbroke and Pope wrote to Swift in November, 1729, about a scheme then in course of execution.
Bolingbroke declares that Pope is now exerting what was eminently and peculiarly his talents, above all writers, living or dead, without excepting Horace; whilst Pope explained that this was a "system of ethics in the Horatian way." The language seems to apply best to the poems afterwards called the Ethic Epistles, though, at this time, Pope, perhaps, had not a very clear plan in his head, and was working at different parts simultaneously.

The Essay on Man, his most distinct scheme, was to form the opening book of his poem.

Three others were to treat of knowledge and its limits, of government--ecclesiastical and civil--and of morality.