Pope's enlargement on the terms of his key question – “what's Property? dear Swift!” – enlists the discourse of humanism in order to argue for the kinds of virtue possible in a corruptible world. A key part of his strategy in defining virtue involves distinguishing the multiple meanings attaching to property. Considered in its public role as the means by which material value passes from one generation to the next, property “alter[s]” in a process whose degeneration follows a line from father to “ungracious Son,” the “booby Lord” who betrays his father's delight. But Pope's lines also distinguish the mobility of real property from a capacity for self-possession that is both “fix'd” and sustained by the companionship of the like-minded. This is not the self-possession of the bourgeois subject – “Scriv'ner” or “City Knight” – with his characteristic acquisitiveness and malleable personality.