Pope has not wandered into any useless digressions; has employed no fictions, no tale or story, and has relied chiefly on the poetry of his style for the purpose of interesting his readers. His style is concise and figurative, forcible and elegant. He has many metaphors and images, artfully interspersed in the driest passages, which stood most in need of such ornaments. Nevertheless there are too many lines, in this performance, plain and prosaic. If any beauty be uncommonly transcendent and peculiar, it is brevity of diction, which, in a few instances, and those perhaps pardonable, has occasioned obscurity. It is hardly to be imagined how much sense, how much thinking, how much observation on human life, is condensed together in a small compass. The late Lord Bathurst repeatedly assured me that he had read the whole scheme of the Essay on Man, in the handwriting of Bolingbroke, and drawn up in a series of propositions, which Pope was to amplify, versify, and illustrate. It has been alleged that Pope did not fully comprehend the drift of the system communicated to him by Bolingbroke, but the remarkable words of his intimate friend, Mr. Jonathan Richardson, a man of known integrity and honour, clearly evince that he did. To the testimony of Richardson, which is decisive, I will now add that Lord Lyttelton, with his usual frankness and ingenuity, assured me that he had frequently talked with Pope on the subject, whose opinions were at that time conformable to his own, when he and his friends were too much inclined to deism. Mr. Harte more than once assured me, that he had seen the pressing letter Dr. Young wrote to Pope, urging him to write something on the side of revelation, to which he alluded in the first Night Thought: O! had he pressed his theme, pursued the track Which opens out of darkness into day! O! had he mounted on his wing of fire, Soared when I sink, and sung immortal man. And when Harte frequently made the same request, he used to answer, "No, no! You have already done it," alluding to Harte's Essay on Reason, which Harte thought a lame apology, and hardly serious.--WARTON.