That mulish folly, not to be reclaimed
By softer methods, must be made ashamed;”
De Quincey[56] uses Pope as a horrible example of this failing, contrasting him with the indignant Juvenal:
“Pope, having no such internal principle of wrath boiling in his breast, * * * was unavoidably a hypocrite of the first magnitude when he affected (or sometimes really conceited himself) to be in a dreadful passion with offenders as a body. It provokes fits of laughter * * * to watch him in the process of brewing the storm that spontaneously will not come; whistling, like a mariner, for a wind to fill his satiric sails; and pumping up into his face hideous grimaces in order to appear convulsed with histrionic rage. * * * As it is, the short puffs of anger, the uneasy snorts of fury in Pope’s satires, give one painfully the feeling of a locomotive-engine with unsound lungs.”
Whether these strictures are just or not, the principle back of them is sound; and more pithily summed up by Landor’s[57] “Nobody but an honest man has a right to scoff at anything.”
Browning[58] carries the idea a step farther, and sounds a warning to dwellers in glass houses:
“Have you essayed attacking ignorance,
Convicting folly, by their opposites,
Knowledge and wisdom? Not by yours for ours,
Fresh ignorance and folly, new for old,