* * * * * * *
Who licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.”
And, again, he expresses his detestation of the selfishness of our species who—
“Destroy all creatures for their sport or gust.”
That all this was no mere affectation of feeling appears from his correspondence and contributions to the periodicals of the time:—
“I cannot think it extravagant,” he writes, “to imagine that mankind are no less, in proportion, accountable for the ill use of their dominion over the lower ranks of beings, than for the exercise of tyranny over their own species. The more entirely the inferior creation is submitted to our power, the more answerable we must be for our mismanagement of them; and the rather, as the very condition of Nature renders them incapable of receiving any recompense in another life for ill-treatment in this.”[146]
Consistently with the expression of this true philosophy, he declares elsewhere that—
“Nothing can be more shocking and horrid than one of our kitchens sprinkled with blood, and abounding with the cries of expiring victims, or with the limbs of dead animals scattered or hung up here and there. It gives one the image of a giant’s den in romance, bestrewed with scattered heads and mangled limbs.”[147]
The personal character of Pope, we may add, has of late been subjected to minute and searching criticism. Some meannesses, springing from an extreme anxiety for fame with after ages, have undoubtedly tarnished his reputation for candour. His excessive animosity towards his public or private enemies may be palliated in part, if not excused, by his well-known feebleness of health and consequent mental irritability. For the rest, he was capable of the most sincere and disinterested attachments; and not his least merit, in literature, is that in an age of servile authorship he cultivated literature not for place or pay, but for its own sake.