indeed flagitious.  Walpole informs Montagu that Addison sent for the young Earl of Warwick, when dying, to show him in what peace a Christian could die; but unluckily he died drunk,” &c. &c.  Now, although there might occur on the subsequent, or on the same page, a faint show of disbelief, seasoned with the expression of “the same candour” (the same exactly as throughout the book), I should say that this editor was either foolish or false to his trust; such a story ought not to have been admitted, except for one brief mark of crushing indignation, unless it were completely proved. Why the words “if true?” that “if" is not a peacemaker.  Why talk of “Cibber’s testimony” to his licentiousness? to what does this amount? that Pope when very young was once decoyed by some noblemen and the player to a house of carnal recreation.  Mr. Bowles was not always a clergyman; and when he was a very young man, was he never seduced into as much?  If I were in the humour for story-telling, and relating little anecdotes, I could tell a much better story of Mr. Bowles than Cibber’s, upon much better authority, viz. that of Mr. Bowles himself.  It was not related by him in my presence, but in that of a third person, whom Mr. Bowles names oftener than once in the course of his replies.  This gentleman related it to me as a humorous and witty anecdote; and so it was, whatever its other characteristics might be.  But should I, for a youthful frolic, brand Mr. Bowles with a “libertine sort of love,” or with “licentiousness?” is he the less now a pious or a good man, for not having always been a priest?  No such thing; I am willing to believe him a good man, almost as good a man as Pope, but no better.

The truth is, that in these days the grand “primum mobile" of England is cant; cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant moral; but always cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life.  It is the fashion, and while it lasts will be too powerful for those who can only exist by taking the tone of the time.  I say cant, because it is a thing of words, without the smallest influence upon human actions; the English being no wiser, no better, and much poorer, and more divided amongst themselves, as well as far less moral, than they were before the prevalence of this verbal decorum.  This hysterical horror of poor Pope’s not very well ascertained, and never fully proved amours (for even Cibber owns that he prevented the somewhat perilous adventure in which Pope was embarking) sounds very virtuous in a controversial pamphlet; but all men of the world who know what life is, or at least what it was to them in their youth, must laugh at such a ludicrous foundation of the charge of “a libertine sort of love;” while the more serious will look upon those who bring forward such charges upon an insulated fact as fanatics or hypocrites, perhaps both.  The two are sometimes compounded in a happy mixture.