Here rests a woman, good without pretence,
    Blest with plain reason and with sober sense;
    No conquest she but o’er herself desir’d;
    No arts essayed, but not to be admir’d. 
    Passion and pride were to her soul unknown,
    Convinc’d that virtue only is our own. 
    So unaffected, so compos’d a mind,
    So firm yet soft, so strong yet so refin’d,
    Heaven as its purest gold by tortures tried,
    The saint sustain’d it, but the woman died.

This may be the best of Pope’s Epitaphs; but if the standard which we have fixed be a just one, it cannot be approved of.  First, it must be observed, that in the epitaphs of this Writer, the true impulse is wanting, and that his motions must of necessity be feeble.  For he has no other aim than to give a favourable portrait of the character of the deceased.  Now mark the process by which this is performed.  Nothing is represented implicitly, that is, with its accompaniment of circumstances, or conveyed by its effects.  The Author forgets that it is a living creature that must interest us and not an intellectual existence, which a mere character is.  Insensible to this distinction the brain of the Writer is set at work to report as flatteringly as he may of the mind of his subject; the good qualities are separately abstracted (can it be otherwise than coldly and unfeelingly?) and put together again as coldly and unfeelingly.  The epitaph now before us owes what exemption it may have from these defects in its general plan to the excruciating disease of which the lady died; but it is liable to the same censure, and is, like the rest, further objectionable in this; namely, that the thoughts have their nature changed and moulded by the vicious expression in which they are entangled, to an excess rendering them wholly unfit for the place they occupy.

    Here rests a woman, good without pretence,
    Blest with plain reason—­

from which sober sense is not sufficiently distinguishable.  This verse and a half, and the one ‘so unaffected, so composed a mind,’ are characteristic, and the expression is true to nature; but they are, if I may take the liberty of saying it, the only parts of the epitaph which have this merit.  Minute criticism is in its nature irksome, and as commonly practiced in books and conversation, is both irksome and injurious.  Yet every mind must occasionally be exercised in this discipline, else it cannot learn the art of bringing words rigorously to the test of thoughts; and these again to a comparison with things, their archetypes, contemplated first in themselves, and secondly in relation to each other; in all which processes the mind must be skilful, otherwise it will be perpetually imposed upon.  In the next couplet the word conquest, is applied in a manner that would have been displeasing even from its triteness in a copy of complimentary verses to a fashionable Beauty; but to talk of making conquests