[6] The only restored lines which improve the orthodoxy of the Essay on Man relate to a future state.
[7] Either Warburton had never heard of Madame de Sévigné's letters, or what is more likely, he was unable to taste their charm. Their delicate graces, and native liveliness, would have been lost upon the man who thought that Pope's artificial epistles were "true models of familiar" letters.
[8] The assertion that the copies had not been published is unaccountable. Every line of them had been published twice over by Pope in his lifetime, and all but two or three pages, had been published again and again.
A wit's a feather, and a chief's a rod,
An honest man's the noblest work of God.—Warburton.
[10] It will be printed in the same form with this, and every future edition of his works, so as to make a part of them.—Warburton.
The Life which Warburton promised with such solemn pomp was never written and he was content to assist Ruffhead in his feeble compilation.
[11] Warburton intimates that Pope's only faults grew out of his credulous belief in "the specious appearance of virtue," which was a sarcasm directed against those friends of Pope who were the enemies of Warburton.
[12] The demand of Warburton was not for a truce on the day of Pope's funeral, which took place seven years before. He insisted that because Pope was dead no one should ever again question his title to be called "good." Neither Pope nor Warburton was accustomed to spare dead men, and the claim for exemption was specially inconsistent in the preface to works which were full of bitter attacks upon both living and dead. Warburton was to go on circulating Pope's venom, and any victim who retaliated was to be pronounced "sacrilegious," "a scandal even to barbarians," and worthy to be "rewarded with execration and a gibbet."
[13] Warburton was a fortunate author. Though he published a host of paradoxical notions, his opponents, if we are to trust his repeated assertions, were always fools and knaves.