LIFE OF ALEXANDER POPE,

MORE controversy, the most of it now happily forgotten, has gathered round the name of Pope, than round that of any poet whatever, ancient or modern, if we except Homer, with whom Pope has become inalienably associated in the popular imagination by his justly-admired versions of the two great Homeric poems. In his own lifetime, and long after his death, he was the undisputed sovereign of the realms of rhyme; and it was not till about the beginning of the present century that his pre-eminence was questioned by Bowles, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others, some of whom virtually, if not expressly, denied that he was a poet at all! Byron, on the other hand, with characteristic exaggeration, ranked him nearly as high as Shakspeare,-his enmity to Bowles and "the rest," perhaps, even more than his admiration of Pope, heightening his estimate of the great satirist. Now, however, his claims as one of the foremost English poets, the first without dispute in his own walk, have been established on a rational basis, and are universally admitted.

Alexander Pope was born on the 21st of May 1688, in Lombard Street, London, where his father was a wholesale linendraper. Both his parents were of the Catholic persuasion, the mother by inheritance from her family, and his father by conversion during a residence at Lisbon.. As there is some reason to believe that he was the son of a Hampshire clergyman, and as his library consisted for the most part of works

in polemical theology, it may be charitably inferred that this adoption of a new form of faith resulted neither from ignorance nor caprice. Having acquired a considerable fortune by trade, £20,000 says Dr Johnson, a very handsome sum in those days, he retired first to Kensington and then to Binfield, a small estate which he had purchased in Windsor Forest. As a Catholic liable to pains and penalties, he was afraid to trust his money in Government or other securities, and kept it by him in a chest, from which he took as occasion required the sums necessary to support his family. An inevitable consequence of this was the gradual disappearance of stock; and we find Pope complaining that, before he realised the subscriptions for the Iliad, he was too poor to purchase books.

The poet delighted to represent himself as of gentle blood," and no doubt he was by the side of his mother, the daughter of an opulent Yorkshire landowner of the name of Turner. Part of her dowry consisted of a rentcharge of £70 on the manor of Ruston, which after the death of both his parents descended to Pope. But when he informs us that his father was of a family of which the Earl of Downe was head, he appears to be in some measure the victim of vanity or misinformation, for if he was of the same family with the Popes who were ennobled in 1628, the relationship must have dated two hundred years before his birth, when the Popes were but simple Oxfordshire yeomen.

As his filial feelings were of uncommon strength, nothing irritated him more than the slanders on the obscurity of his birth, industriously circulated by Moore, Ducket, Welsted, Bentley, and others, noteless pamphleteers for Curll. His father was said to be a mechanic, a hatter, a farmer, a bankrupt. Of these he took no immediate notice :

"Full ten years slandered did he once reply?" But when they were reproduced by persons so considerable as Lord Hervey, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, he was goaded to defence and retaliation in the Prologue to the Satires, and in

a letter to a noble lord. "Of gentle blood," he says, "each parent sprung.' "As to my father, I could assure you, my lord, that he was no mechanic, (neither a hatter, nor, which might please your lordship yet better, a cobbler,) but in truth, of a very tolerable family. And my mother of an ancient one, as well born and educated as that lady whom your lordship made choice of to be the mother of your own children." The family being Catholic, it was impossible for young Pope to be educated at any of the great public schools without submitting to intolerable humiliation, and accordingly his education commenced under the paternal roof, an old aunt teaching him to read, and also to write, by copying printed books. The titlepage of a juvenile exercise of his written in this way, was executed with so much excellence, that one who saw it says it required close inspection to distinguish it from typography. When about eight years old he was placed under a priest named Banister, who set out with the idea of teaching him Latin and Greek together. "After having been under that priest about a year," says he, "I was sent to the seminary at Twyford, and then to a school by Hyde Park corner; and with the two latter masters lost what little I had got under my first. About twelve I went with my father into the Forest, and there learned for a few months under a fourth priest. This was all the teaching I ever had; and God knows, it extended a very little way." The ruling passion, to use a favourite expression of his own, developed itself within him at a very early age; for while at the Twyford seminary, he lampooned his master, and was in consequence brutally flogged. This, his first known attempt at satire, procured for him severe physical sufferings, the precursors and earnest of those more acute mental pangs entailed on him by the satiric effusions of his manhood.

By the weakness or indulgence of his father, he was left while a mere boy to educate himself-a course of questionable propriety even in his case, and to be deprecated in almost every other. He took to reading with great eagerness and

enthusiasm, and delighted especially in poetry. He skimmed the surface of a great number of English, French, Latin, and Greek poets, merely for the stories to be found in them, and without any serious intention of acquiring the languages. Metrical versions of the ancient poets were then much read,— Ovid, Juvenal, &c., done into English by eminent hands, constituting a very considerable proportion of the publications of that day; and some of Pope's earliest efforts were versions of passages of Ovid and Statius into English heroics. His father accidentally stimulated his poetic proclivities by prescribing him subjects, and forcing him to correctness by repeated revisals. For five or six years he read with extraordinary assiduity, but without system, following where fancy led; and these years he always looked back upon as the happiest of his life. He thought himself the better in some respects for having had no regular education, having read originally for the sense, in contradistinction to the general practice of reading so many years only for words. But even in the case of Pope with his strong sense, unwearied application, tenacious memory, and insatiable thirst for knowledge, De Quincey, a most competent authority on scholastic matters, after rigidly testing his acquirements, has put on record this deliberate judgment:-"The result, therefore, of Pope's self-tuition appears to us, considered in the light of an attempt to acquire certain accomplishments of knowledge, a most complete failure."

Before he was twelve years old he was so much struck with Dryden's numbers, that he prevailed on some friend to carry him to "glorious John's" head-quarters at Will's coffee-house in Russel Street, and thus were brought into momentary juxtaposition, though unconsciously on one side, the rising and the setting suns of British poesy in that age. "I learned versification wholly from Dryden's works, who had improved it much beyond any of our former poets, and would probably have brought it to its perfection, had he not been unhappily obliged to write so often in haste."