“In the eagerness of conversation, the first emotions of the mind often burst out before they are considered.  In the tumult of business, interest and passion have their genuine effect; but a friendly letter is a calm and deliberate performance in the cool of leisure, in the stillness of solitude, and surely no man sits down by design to depreciate his own character.

“Friendship has no tendency to secure veracity; for by whom can a man so much wish to be thought better than he is, as by him whose kindness he desires to gain or keep?  Even in writing to the world there is less constraint; the author is not confronted with his reader, and takes his chance of approbation among the different dispositions of mankind; but a letter is addressed to a single mind, of which the prejudices and partialities are known, and must therefore please, if not by favouring them, by forbearing to oppose them.  To charge those favourable representations which men give of their own minds, with the guilt of hypocritical falsehood, would show more severity than knowledge.  The writer commonly believes himself.  Almost every man’s thoughts while they are general are right, and most hearts are pure while temptation is away.  It is easy to awaken generous sentiments in privacy; to despise death when there is no danger; to glow with benevolence when there is nothing to be given.  While such ideas are formed they are felt, and self-love does not suspect the gleam of virtue to be the meteor of fancy.

“If the letters of Pope are considered merely as compositions, they seem to be premeditated and artificial.  It is one thing to write, because there is something which the mind wishes to discharge; and another to solicit the imagination, because ceremony or vanity requires something to be written.  Pope confesses his early letters to be vitiated with affectation and ambition.  To know whether he disentangles himself from these perverters of epistolary integrity, his book and his life must be set in comparison.  One of his favourite topics is contempt of his own poetry.  For this, if it had been real, he would deserve no commendation; and in this he was certainly not sincere, for his high value of himself was sufficiently observed; and of what could he be proud but of his poetry?  He writes, he says, when ’he has just nothing else to do,’ yet Swift complains that he was never at leisure for conversation, because he ‘had always some poetical scheme in his head.’  It was punctually required that his writing-box should be set upon his bed before he rose; and Lord Oxford’s domestic related that, in the dreadful winter of ’40, she was called from her bed by him four times in one night, to supply him with paper lest he should lose a thought.