If the soul of sensibility, which I believe Pope really possessed, had been enclosed in a healthful frame and an agreeable person, we might have reckoned him among our _preux chevaliers_, and have had sonnets instead of satires. But he seems to have been ever divided between two contending feelings. He was peculiarly sensible to the charms of women, and his habits as a valetudinarian, rendered their society and attention not only soothing and delightful, but absolutely necessary to him: while, unhappily, there mingled with this real love for them, and dependance on them as a sex, the most irascible self-love; and a torturing consciousness of that feebleness and deformity of person, which embittered all his intercourse with them. He felt that, in his character of poet, he could, by his homage, flatter their vanity, and excite their admiration and their fear; but, at the same time, he was shivering under the apprehension that, as a man, they regarded him with contempt; and that he could never hope to awaken in a female bosom any feelings corresponding with his own. So far he was unjust to us and to himself: his friend Lord Lyttelton, and his enemy Lord Hervey,[124] might have taught him better. On reviewing Pope's life, his works, and his correspondence, it seems to me that these two opposite feelings contending in his bosom from youth to age, will account for the general character of his poems with a reference to our sex:--will explain why women bear so prominent a part in all his works, whether as objects of poetical gallantry, honest admiration, or poignant satire: why there is not among all his productions more than one poem decidedly amatory, (and that one partly suppressed in the ordinary editions of his works,) while women only have furnished him with the materials of all his _chef-d'oeuvres_: his Elegy, his 'Rape of the Lock,' the 'Epistle of Heloise,' and the second of his Moral Essays. He may call us, and prove us, in his antithetical style, "a contradiction:"[125] but we may retort; for, as far as women are concerned, Pope was himself one miserable antithesis. * * * * *