“The sublime and the pathetic are the two chief nerves of all genuine poesy.  What is there transcendently sublime or pathetic in Pope?. . .  He early left the more poetical provinces of his art, to become a moral, didactic, and satiric poet. . .  And because I am, perhaps, unwilling to speak out in plain English, I will adopt the following passage of Voltaire, which, in my opinion, as exactly characteristizes Pope as it does his model, Boileau, for whom it was originally designed.  ’Incapable peut-etre du sublime qui eleve l’ame, et du sentiment qui l’attendrit, mais fait pour eclairer ceux a qui la nature accorda l’un et l’autre; laborieux, severe, precis, pur, harmonieux, il devint enfin le poete de la Raison.’. . .  A clear head and acute understanding are not sufficient alone to make a poet; the most solid observations on human life, expressed with the utmost elegance and brevity, are morality and not poetry. . .  It is a creative and glowing imagination, acer spiritus ac vis, and that alone, that can stamp a writer with this exalted and very uncommon character.”

Warton believes that Pope’s projected epic on Brutus, the legendary found of Britain, “would have more resembled the ‘Henriade’ than the ‘Iliad,’ or even the ‘Gierusalemme Liberata’; that it would have appeared (if this scheme had been executed) how much, and for what reasons, the man that is skillful in painting modern life, and the most secret foibles and follies of his contemporaries, is, THEREFORE, disqualified for representing the ages of heroism, and that simple life which alone epic poetry can gracefully describe. . .  Wit and satire are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are eternal.”  The largest portion of Pope’s work, says the author’s closing summary, “is of the didactic, moral, and satiric kind; and consequently not of the most poetic species of poetry; when it is manifest that good sense and judgment were his characteristical excellencies, rather than fancy and invention. . .  He stuck to describing modern manners; but those manners, because they are familiar, uniform, artificial, and polished, are in their very nature, unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse.  He gradually became one of the most correct, even, and exact poets that ever wrote. . .  Whatever poetical enthusiasm he actually possessed, he withheld and stifled.  The perusal of him affects not our minds with such strong emotions as we feel from Homer and Milton; so that no man of a true poetical spirit is master of himself while he reads them. . .  He who would think the ’Faerie Queene,’ ‘Palamon and Arcite,’ the ‘Tempest’ or ‘Comus,’ childish and romantic might relish Pope.  Surely it is no narrow and niggardly encomium to say, he is the great poet of Reason, the first of ethical authors in verse.”