Speak when you're sure, yet speak with diffidence.
Dennis objected that a man when sure should speak "with a modest assurance," and Pope wrote on the margin of the manuscript, "Dennis, p. 21. Alter the inconsistency."
Pope's maxim was commended by Franklin. He found that his overbearing, dictatorial manner roused needless opposition, and he resolved never "to use a word that imported a fixed opinion," but he employed instead the qualifying phrases, "I conceive," "I imagine," or "it so appears to me at present." "To this," he says, "after my character of integrity, I think it principally owing that I had early so much weight with my fellow citizens when I proposed new institutions or alterations in the old; for I was but a bad speaker, subject to much hesitation, and yet I generally carried my point." He admits that his humility was feigned. Had it been real there would have been no need for "I conceive," "I imagine," which are implied without a tiresome, superfluous repetition. Unless the dogmatism is in the mind opinions have not the tone of decrees.
[238] Warton praises Pope for practising the precept in correcting the poems of Wycherley, and condemned Wycherley for ungenerously resenting the candour of his critic. Bowles extenuates the conduct of Wycherley, and says that "the superannuated bard" bore the corrections with "great temper till Pope seriously advised him to turn the whole into prose." Warton and Bowles were deceived by the printed correspondence of Pope and Wycherley, and were not aware that the letters were garbled in the very particulars which relate to the cause of the quarrel,—a quarrel so discreditable to Pope that he had recourse to forgery to shield himself and throw the blame upon Wycherley. It is certain that "the superannuated bard" did not take offence at the advice to turn his works into prose, and there is no reason to doubt the contemporaneous report that his anger arose from discovering that Pope, while professing unlimited friendship, had made him the subject of some satirical verses.
[239] This picture was taken to himself by John Dennis, a furious old critic by profession, who, upon no other provocation, wrote against this Essay and its author in a manner perfectly lunatic: for, as to the mention made of him in ver. 270, he took it as a compliment, and said it was treacherously meant to cause him to overlook this abuse of his person.—Pope.
Pope's acrimonious note on his early antagonist first appeared in the edition of 1743, when Dennis had been some years dead. "His book against me," the poet wrote to Caryll, Nov. 19, 1712, "made me very heartily merry in two minutes' time," and here we find him still smarting with resentment after thirty years and upwards had gone by, and his enemy was in the grave. The original reading in the manuscript of ver. 585 was "But D—— reddens." The substituted name is taken from Dennis's tragedy of "Appius and Virginia," which appeared in 1709. The stare was one of his characteristics. "He starts, stares, and looks round him at every jerk of his person forward," says Sir Richard Steele, when describing his walk. The "tremendous" was not only a sarcasm on his appearance, but on his partiality for the epithet, which was an old topic of ridicule. "If," said Gildon, in 1702, "there is anything of tragedy in the piece, it lies in the word 'tremendous,' for he is so fond of it he had rather use it in every page than slay his beloved Iphigenia." Gay, in 1712, jeeringly dedicated his Mohocks to Mr. D[ennis], and assigned, among the reasons for the selection, that his theme was "horrid and tremendous."
[240] This thought occurs also in Donne's fourth Satire, which our poet has modernised:
And though his face be as ill
As theirs, which in old hangings whip Christ, still
He strives to look worse.—Wakefield.
[241] It may not be known to every reader that noblemen and the sons of noblemen are admitted of course at our universities to the degree of M.A., after keeping the terms of two years.—Wakefield.
The privilege is now abolished.