Page:A Key to the Lock. Or, A Treatise Proving, Beyond All Contradiction, the Dangerous Tendency of a Late Poem, Entituled, The Rape of the Lock, to Government and Religion - Pope (1715).djvu/32



Whatever this Author may think of that Peace, I imagine it the most extraordinary Star that ever appear'd in our Hemisphere. A Star that is to bring us all the Wealth and Gold of the Indies; and from whose Influence, not Mr. John Partridge alone, (whose worthy Labours this Writer so ungenerously ridicules) but all true Britains may, with no less Authority than he, prognosticate the Fall of Lewis, in the Restraint of the exorbitant Power of France, and the Fate of Rome in the triumphant Condition of the Church of England.

We have now considered this Poem in its Political View, wherein we have shewn that it hath two different Walks of Satyr, the one in the Story it self, which is a Ridicule on the late Transactions in general; the other in the Machinary, which is a Satyr on the Ministers of State in particular. I shall now show that the same Poem, taken in another Light, has a Tendency to Popery, which is secretly insinuated through the whole.

In the first place, he has conveyed to us the Doctrine of Guardian Angels and Patron Saints in the Machinary of his Sylphs, which being a