Our author received his education at Oxford, and while he remained at the university he wrote a comedy called The Rival Modes, his only dramatic performance.  This play was condemned in the representation, but he printed it in 1727, with the following motto, which the author of the Notes to the Dunciad, by way of irony, calls modest.

  Hic coestus, artemque repono.

Upon the death of our author’s grandfather, he enjoyed the place of paymaster to the band of gentlemen-pensioners, in conjunction with his younger brother, Arthur More; of this place his mother procured the reversion from his late Majesty during his father’s lifetime.  Being a man of a gay disposition, he insinuated himself into the favour of his grace the duke of Wharton, and being, like him, destitute of prudence, he joined with that volatile great man in writing a paper called the Inquisitor, which breathed so much the spirit of Jacobitism, that the publisher thought proper to sacrifice his profit to his safety, and discontinue it.

By using too much freedom with the character of Pope, he provoked that gentleman, who with great spirit stigmatized him in his Dunciad.  In his second book Mr. Pope places before the eyes of the dunces the phantom of a poet.  He seems willing to give some account of the possibility of dulness making a wit, which can be done no otherwise than by chance.  The lines which have relation to Mr. More are so elegantly satyric, that it probably will not displease our readers to find them inserted here.

  A poet’s form she plac’d before their eyes,
  And bad the nimblest racer seize the prize;
  No meagre muse-rid mope, adult and thin,
  In a dun night gown of his own loose skin,
  But such a bulk as no twelve bards could raise,
  Twelve starv’ling bards of these degenerate days. 
  All as a partridge plump, full-fed, and fair,
  She form’d this image of well-bodied air,
  With pert, slat eyes, she window’d well its head,
  A brain of feathers, and a heart of lead,
  And empty words she gave, and sounding strain,
  But senseless, lifeless! idol void and vain! 
  Never was dash’d out at one lucky hit,
  A fool so just a copy of a wit;
  So like, that critics said, and courtiers swore,
  A wit it was, and call’d the phantom More.

Though these lines of Pope are sufficiently satirical, yet it seems they very little affected Mr. More.  A gentleman intimately acquainted with him informs us, that he has heard Mr. More several times repeat those lines, without discovering any chagrin; and he used to observe, that he was now secure of being transmitted to posterity:  an honour which, says he, I could never have arrived at, but by Pope’s means.  The cause of the quarrel between this gentleman and that great poet seems to have been this.