I must stop. Swift alone might have seemed capable of writing some passages, for instance, that on the fall of Curll. We might have excused it in Swift; the extremity of despair, the rage of misanthropy, the approach of madness, might have carried him to such excess. But Pope, who lived calm and admired in his villa, and who was only urged by literary rancor! He can have had no nerves! How could a poet have dragged his talent wantonly through such images, and so constrained his ingeniously woven verses to receive such dirt? Picture a pretty drawing-room basket, destined only to contain flowers and fancy work sent down to the kitchen to be turned into a receptacle for filth. In fact, all the filth of literary life is here; and heaven knows what it then was! In no age were hack-writers so beggarly and so vile. Poor fellows, like Richard Savage, who slept during one winter in the open air on the cinders of a glass manufactory, lived on what he received for a dedication, knew the inside of a prison, rarely dined, and drank at the expense of his friends; pamphleteers, like Tutchin, who was soundly whipped; plagiarists, like Ward, exposed in the pillory and pelted with rotten eggs and apples; courtesans, like Eliza Heywood, notorious by the shamelessness of their public confessions; bought journalists, hired slanderers, venders of scandal and insults, half rogues, complete roisterers, and all the literary vermin which haunted the gambling-houses, the stews, the gin-cellars, and at a signal from a bookseller, stung honest folk for a crownpiece. These villanies, this foul linen, the greasy coat six years old, the musty pudding, and the rest, are to be found in Pope as in Hogarth, with English coarseness and precision. This is their error, they are realists, even under the classical wig; they do not disguise what is ugly and mean; they describe that ugliness and meanness with their exact outlines and distinguishing marks; they do not clothe them in a fine cloak of general ideas; they do not cover them with the pretty innuendoes of society. This is the reason why their satires are so harsh. Pope does not flog the dunces, he knocks them down; his poem is hard and malicious; it is so much so that it becomes clumsy; to add to the punishment of dunces, he begins at the deluge, writes historical passages, represents at length the past, present, and future empire of Dullness, the library of Alexandria burned by Omar, learning extinguished by the invasion of the barbarians and by the superstition of the Middle Ages, the empire of stupidity which extends over England and will swallow it up. What paving-stones to crush flies!