De Quincey thought that the "formal exposure of Pope's hollow-heartedness" would be most profitably accomplished by laying open thoroughly the ethical argument of the Essay on Man. He declined the task as too long and polemical for an article in a journal, but he stated his views in general terms. He said that the poem "sinned chiefly by want of central principle, and by want therefore of all coherency amongst the separate thoughts." He objects that the sense will vary with the nature of the connecting links we supply, and he ascribes the opposite interpretations of Crousaz and Warburton to the ambiguity which leaves readers the choice of "a loyal or treasonable meaning."[932] He imputes the fault to the impossibility of completing the argument without spoiling the poetry, and to the superficial nature of Pope's studies, "if study we can call a style of reading so desultory as his." This vagrant habit of mind he attributes to "luxurious indolence." "The poet," he says, "fastidiously retreated from all that threatened labour. He fluttered among the flower-beds of literature or philosophy far more in the character of a libertine butterfly for casual enjoyment, than of a hard-working bee pursuing a premeditated purpose."[933] Indolence cannot justly be charged upon Pope. He plodded at his art with the steadiness of a man who follows a regular calling.[934] His ignorance of philosophy, his want of due preparation for his Essay, arose from defects of understanding, and not from a moral infirmity of will. He was self-educated, and had never penetrated in his youth by regular and sustained approaches to the heart of any difficult science. He skimmed literature to pick up sentiments which could be versified, and to learn attractive forms of composition. His mind took the set of his early habits, and he appears in manhood to have had no conception of philosophical thought, no glimmer of the combination of philosophical details into an integral design. His works abound in isolated ideas which are marked by sound sense, and side by side with them are many idle or extravagant notions, and glaring contradictions. The pieces were not struck off at a heat. They were built up slowly, composed patiently, and corrected repeatedly. He never spared pains, and the want of reflection his works discover was the fault of an intellect unconscious of its weaknesses. To him the disjointed bits of philosophy presented no gaps. He says in his "Design" that the system "was short yet not imperfect." He believed that the conciseness added to "the force as well as grace of his arguments," and that he had nowhere "sacrificed perspicuity to ornament, wandered from precision, or broken the chain of the reasoning." His love of fame would have prevented his sending forth knowingly a weak and fragmentary poem. His moral apathy did not therefore consist in the self-indulgent negligence which refuses to put itself to a strain. The moral offence was in another direction,--in the