"When Mr. Pope had projected to give the Rape of the Lock its present form of a mock-heroic poem, he was obliged to find it with its machinery. For, as the subject of the Epic consists of two parts, the metaphysical and the civil; so this mock epic, which is of the satiric kind, and receives its grace from a ludicrous mimicry of other's pomp and solemnity, was to have the like compounded nature. And as the civil part is intentionally debased by the choice of a trifling action; so should the metaphysical by the application of some very extravagant system. A rule which, though neither Boileau nor Garth had been careful enough to attend to, our author's good sense would not suffer him to overlook. And that sort of machinery which his judgment informed him was only fit for use, his admirable invention soon supplied. There was but one systematic extravagance in all nature which was to his purpose, the Rosicrucian Philosophy; and this by the effort of a well-directed imagination, he presently seized. The fanatic Alchemists, in the search after the great secret, had invented a means altogether to their end: it was a kind of Theological Philosophy, made up in a mixture of almost equal parts of Pagan Platonism, Christian Quietism and the Jewish Cabbala; a mixture monstrous enough to frighten reason from human commerce. This system, he tells us, he took as he found it in a little French tract called, _La Comte de Gabalis_. This book is written in dialogue, and is a delicate and very ingenious piece of raillery on that invisible sect by the Abbe Villiers; the strange stories that went about of the feats and adventures of their adepts making, at that time, a great deal of noise at Paris. But, as in this satirical dialogue, Mr. P. found several whimsies of a very high mysterious nature, told of their elementary beings, which were unfit to come into the machinery of such a sort of poem, he has, in their stead, with great judgment, substituted the legendary stories of Guardian Angels, and the nursery tales of the Fairies, and dexterously accommodated them to the rest of the Rosicrucian System. And to this artful address (unless we will be so uncharitable to think he intended to give a needless scandal) we must suppose he referred in these two lines, "If e'er one Vision touch'd thy infant thought, Of all the _nurse_ and all the _priest_ have taught." Thus, by the most beautiful invention imaginable, he has contrived that (as in the serious Epic, the popular belief supports the machinery) in his mock Epic the machinery (taken from a circumstance the most humbling to reason in all philosophical fanaticism) should serve to dismount learned pride and arrogance." On verse 45, canto 1, he remarks:--"The Poet here forsakes his Rosicrucian system; which, in this part, is too extravagant even for ludicrous poetry."