Note 23 — THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

This far-fetched excuse of Pope for rebuking the vanity of contemporary poets, was a clumsy expedient to gratify his own vanity in proclaiming to the world that "he had been encouraged by the great, and commended by the eminent." He had not much title to reprove the vanity of his brethren, when, in the same sentence, he recorded the praise which the different orders of mankind had bestowed upon himself.