Thus spite of all the Frenchman's witty lies
Most vices are but virtues in disguise.
The witty Frenchman was La Rochefoucauld. Pope's counter-maxim is only a form of La Rochefoucald's principle, converted into an apparent contradiction by an equivocal use of the phrase "virtues in disguise." Those who pursue vicious objects are reluctant to allow that they are the slaves of vice. "Hence," says Hutcheson, in a passage quoted by Warton, "the basest actions are dressed in some tolerable mask. What others call avarice, appears to the agent a prudent care of a family or friends; fraud, artful conduct; malice and revenge, a just sense of honour; fire and sword and desolation among enemies, a just defence of our country; persecution, a zeal for truth." Pope assumes that the vice is inspired by genuine virtue, whereas the virtue is a pretence, a flimsy pretext to excuse wrong-doing. The vice is real, the virtue fictitious, and this is the principle of La Rochefoucauld.
[1226] Dryden's Hind and Panther, Part i.:
For truth has such a face and such a mien,
As to be loved needs only to be seen.—Wakefield.
The lines from ver. 217 to 221 are thus varied in the MS.:
Vice all abhor, the monster is too foul;
Naked, indeed, she shocks us to the soul;
But dressed too well, with tempting time and place,
That but to pity her is to embrace.
Where art thou, Vice? 'twas never yet agreed, etc.
[1227] The word is inappropriate. Men do not become sensual out of pity to the miseries of sensuality, or envious from compassion for the pangs of envy. Pity may be felt for the evils which vice entails, but this is not pity for the vice, nor a temptation to practise it.
[1228] After ver. 220 in ed. 1:
A cheat, a whore, who starts not at the name,
In all the Inns of Court, or Drury Lane?
These two omitted in the subsequent editions.—Pope.