The bulk of his fortune he bequeath’d to Mrs. Blount, with whom he lived in the strictest friendship, and for whom he is said to have entertained the warmest affection.  His works, which are in the hands of every person of true taste, and will last as long as our language will be understood, render unnecessary all further remarks on his writings.  He was equally admired for the dignity and sublimity of his moral and philosophical works, the vivacity of his satirical, the clearness and propriety of his didactic, the richness and variety of his descriptive, and the elegance of all, added to an harmony of versification and correctness of sentiment and language, unknown to our former poets, and of which he has set an example which will be an example or a reproach to his successors.  His prose-stile is as perfect in its kind as his poetic, and has all the beauties proper for it, joined to an uncommon force and perspicuity.

Under the profession of the Roman-Catholic religion, to which he adhered to the last, he maintained all the moderation and charity becoming the most thorough and confident Protestant.  His conversation was natural, easy and agreeable, without any affectation of displaying his wit, or obtruding his own judgment, even upon subjects of which he was so eminently a master.

The moral character of our author, as it did not escape the lash of his calumniators in his life; so have there been attempts since his death to diminish his reputation.  Lord Bolingbroke, whom Mr. Pope esteemed to almost an enthusiastic degree of admiration, was the first to make this attack.  Not many years ago, the public were entertained with this controversy immediately upon the publication of his lordship’s Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism, and the Idea of a Patriot King.  Different opinions have been offered, some to extenuate the fault of Mr. Pope, for printing and mutilating these letters, without his lordship’s knowledge; others to blame him for it as the highest breach of friendship, and the greatest mark of dishonour.  It would exceed our proposed bounds to enter into the merits of this controversy; the reader, no doubt, will find it amply discussed in that account of the life of this great author, which Mr. Warburton has promised the public.

This great man is allowed to have been one of the first rank amongst the poets of our nation, and to acknowledge the superiority of none but Shakespear, Milton, and Dryden.  With the two former, it is unnatural to compare him, as their province in writing is so very different.  Pope has never attempted the drama, nor published an Epic Poem, in which these two distinguished genius’s have so wonderfully succeeded.  Though Pope’s genius was great, it was yet of so different a cast from Shakespear’s, and Milton’s, that no comparison can be justly formed.  But if this may be said of the former two, it will by no means hold with respect to the later, for between him and Dryden, there is a great similarity of writing, and a very striking coincidence of genius.  It will not perhaps be unpleasing to our readers, if we pursue this comparison, and endeavour to discover to whom the superiority is justly to be attributed, and to which of them poetry owes the highest obligations.