ambiguities which were intended to pass off the Essay for anti-christian with infidels, and for christian with believers, and which resulted in Pope's adoption of the first interpretation under Bolingbroke, and of the second under Warburton. The dereliction of principle was worse than De Quincey supposed. He has equally underrated the blots in the philosophy when he imagined that Pope erred only by omissions. The "chasms" in his ethics are trifling compared to the radical vice of his doctrines, and the repeated conflict of jarring systems. The "audacious dogmatism and insolent quibbles"[935] of Warburton would not have been needed in expanding an abbreviated argument. He had to distort the obvious meaning of Pope in order to produce a semblance of consistency, and he has still oftener left the language of the text without comment because it was beyond the power of shameless misinterpretation to effect an ostensible harmony. The judgments on the Essay on Man have been very various. "It appears to me," says Voltaire, "the most beautiful, the most useful, the most sublime didactic poem that has ever been written in any language." He said on another occasion that Pope "carried the torch into the abyss of being, and that the art of poetry, sometimes frivolous, and sometimes divine, was in him useful to the human race."[936] Voltaire had a twofold reason for his admiration. As a hater of christianity he hailed in the Essay the championship of natural religion against revealed, and as an author he delighted in the rhymed philosophy which was the staple of his own prosaic verse. Marmontel joined in the praise of the poet, but formed a juster estimate of the moralist. "Pope has shown," he said, "how high poetry could soar on the wings of philosophy. But he had adopted a system which presented terrible difficulties, and in reply to the complaints of man on the misery of his condition he usually offers images for proofs, and abuse for reasons."[937] The censure is just. Pope loves to silence objections by vilifying mankind, and calling his adversaries impious, proud, and fools. Dugald Stewart agreed with Voltaire. "The Essay on Man," he says, "is the noblest specimen of philosophical poetry which our language affords; and, with the exception of a very few passages, contains a valuable summary of all that human reason has been able hitherto to advance in justification of the moral government of God."[938] The "few faulty passages" were subsequently specified by Stewart, and such is the power of sound to withdraw the mind from the sense that this able metaphysician overlooked the fundamental errors of the poem, albeit they contradicted his own ethical views. Hazlitt differs as much from Stewart as Marmontel did from Voltaire. "The Essay on Man," he tells us, "is not Pope's best work. All that he says, 'the very words and to the self-same tune,' would prove just as well that whatever is is wrong, as that whatever is is