Sporus, "the bug with gilded wings"--are portraits one may almost call
beautiful in their bitter phrasing. There is nothing make-believe here
as there is in the virtue of the letters. This is Pope's confession, the
image of his soul. Elsewhere in Pope the accomplishment is too often
rhetorical, though _The Rape of the Lock_ is as delicate in artifice as
a French fairy-tale, the _Dunciad_ an amusing assault of a major
Lilliputian on minor Lilliputians, and the _Essay on Criticism_--what a
regiment of witty lines to be written by a youth of twenty or
twenty-one!--much nearer being a great essay in verse than is generally
admitted nowadays. As for the _Essay on Man_, one can read! it more than
once only out of a sense of duty. Pope has nothing to tell us that we
want to know about man except in so far as he dislikes him. We praise
him as the poet who makes remarks--as the poet, one might almost say,
who makes faces. It is when he sits in the scorner's chair, whether in
good humour or in bad, that he is the little lord of versifiers.