POPE.

Nothing occasional.  No haste.  No rivals.  No compulsion.  Practised only one form of verse.  Facility from use.  Emulated former pieces.  Cooper’s-hill.  Dryden’s ode.  Affected to disdain flattery. Not happy in his selection of patrons. Cobham, Bolingbroke.[260] Cibber’s abuse will be better to him than a dose of hartshorn.  Poems long delayed.  Satire and praise late, alluding to something past.  He had always some poetical plan in his head.[261] Echo to the sense.  Would not constrain himself too much.  Felicities of language.  Watts.[262] Luxury of language. Motives to study; want of health, want of money; helps to study; some small patrimony. Prudent and frugal; pint of wine.

     LETTERS.

Amiable disposition—­but he gives his own character. Elaborate.  Think what to say—­say what one thinks.  Letter on sickness to Steele. On Solitude.  Ostentatious benevolence.  Professions of sincerity. Neglect of fame.  Indifference about everything. Sometimes gay and airy, sometimes sober and grave. Too proud of living among the great.  Probably forward to make acquaintance. No literary man ever talked so much of his fortune.  Grotto.  Importance.  Post-office, letters open. Cant of despising the world. Affectation of despising poetry. His easiness about the critics.. Something of foppery. His letters to the ladies—­pretty. Abuse of Scripture—­not all early.  Thoughts in his letters that are elsewhere.

     ESSAY ON MAN.

Ramsay missed the fall of man. Others the immortality of the soul.  Address to our Saviour. Excluded by Berkeley. Bolingbroke’s notions not understood.  Scale of Being turn it in prose.  Part and not the whole always said. Conversation with Bol.  R. 220.[263] Bol. meant ill.  Pope well. Crousaz.  Resnel.  Warburton. Good sense.  Luxurious—­felicities of language.  Wall. Loved labour—­always poetry in his head. Extreme sensibility.  Ill-health, headaches. He never laughed. No conversation. No writings against Swift.  Parasitical epithets.  Six lines of Iliad.[264] He used to set down what occurred of thoughts—­a line—­a couplet. The humorous lines end sinner.  Prunello.[265] First line made for the sound, or v. versa.  Foul lines in Jervas. More notices of books early than late.

     DUNCIAD.

     The line on Phillips borrowed from another poem.  Pope did not
     increase the difficulties of writing. Poetaepulorum.

MODERN LITERATURE—­BAYLE’S CRITICAL DICTIONARY