were Roman Catholics, and the event of the year of Pope's birth may be said to have proved fatal to the cause of the Roman Catholics in England. As a Catholic Pope could not go to one of the public schools, and he never received the drilling in the classical languages that he might have obtained there. It is said that Pope taught himself to write by copying print, and throughout his life his small fine hand-writing bore traces of its origin. Pope received his early education from a priest, to whom his father had given an asylum, and who repaid the kindness by teaching the little boy the rudiments of Latin and Greek. The young Pope was afterwards sent in turn to two small Catholic schools; but as Catholic schools they were not likely to be flourishing, and they seem to have been very bad. It is said that he left his first school for fleshing his youthful satire on the master, and, if the story be true, it is a characteristic beginning. His school-days were over by the time that he was twelve, from which early age the poet carried on his own education. He says that he took to reading by himself "with very great eagerness and enthusiasm, especially for poetry. In a few years I had dipped into a very great number of the English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets." This would be a capital training for a poet, but, unfortunately, the statement must be qualified. Voltaire, who personally knew Pope, declared that he could hardly speak or read a word of French : but the latter statement must surely be exaggerated. Pope's knowledge of Italian also was limited, and not like that of Milton. He certainly was never a scholar in the strict sense of the word, but he could translate the classical authors in a way to gather their sense

:

without paying much attention to the refinements or niceties of their language.

A sickly child, Pope grew up deformed, and so short as to be almost a dwarf. Throughout his whole life he suffered a great deal from illness, especially severe headaches. An undercurrent of unhappiness caused by his bodily ailments, and a nervous irritability, which is not uncommon with very short men, can be traced through all his life. Unable to engage in the sports of boyhood, he showed poetical talent at a very early age.

Why did I write? What sin to me unknown,
Dipt me in my ink,-my parents', or my own?
As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,

I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came.

In the poetical phraseology of the time, the word "numbers was used for poetry in imitation of the Latin numeri.

"I left no calling for this idle trade,

No duty broke, no father disobey'd.

The muse but serv'd to ease some friend, not wife,
To help me through this long disease, my life."

This last pathetic statement should always be borne in mind by all who deal with the biography of Pope. Poets have been described as a "genus irritabile," but Pope had physical reasons for his irritability. Asthma, in itself partly a disease of the nerves, was one form of his illness; ultimately dropsy was superadded.

Pope never married. After his father's death, his mother living with him, he took up his residence at a villa, which he purchased at Twickenham, a place on the Thames, about twenty miles above London, if the wind

ings of the river be followed, and a shorter distance by a straight road. This villa at "Twitnam," as Pope preferred to call the place, was to the poet a constant delight. He took a keen interest in "the purest of all human pleasures," gardening; and the quaint grotto which he caused to be constructed underneath a high road is still shown to a curious public. Here Pope was visited by the most eminent men of the day, politicians or men of letters. He was proud to boast of his friendly intercourse with Lord Bolingbroke-the St. John to whom the Essay on Man is dedicated, as well as the assistance that Peterborough, the brilliant but erratic general, gave him in gardening.

"There my retreat the best companions grace,
Chiefs out of war, and statesmen out of place.
There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl
The feast of reason and the flow of soul.

And he, whose lightning pierced the Iberian lines,
Now forms my quincunx, and now ranks my vines,
Or tames the genius of the stubborn plain,

Almost as quickly as he conquered Spain."

Probably no "statesman out of place" ever had nobler eulogy passed upon him than that with which Pope honoured Harley, Lord Oxford:

"A soul supreme in each hard instance tried,
Above all pain, all passion, and all pride,
The rage of power, the blast of public breath,

The lust of lucre, and the dread of death."

Pope was a good friend, but one of the most endearing points about him was his strong affection for his mother. [See iv. 110.] On her monument he called her mater

optima, mulierum amantissima. With genuine feeling he seems to have written these tender lines:

"Me let the tender office long engage

To rock the cradle of reposing age,

With lenient arts extend a mother's breath,

Make languor smile, and soothe the bed of death,
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,
And keep awhile one parent from the sky."

After his mother's death he seems to have been more and more miserable as his diseases increased upon him, until he died on May 30, 1744, an eminent man of letters but never a happy man. He was then fifty-six.

II. POPE'S POETRY.

In the last year of the seventeenth century, Pope, aged twelve years old, was, at his own express desire, taken up to London in order to see Dryden, the reigning poet, for whom, as a convert to the Roman Catholic religion, Pope's family had naturally a special affection. It was at Will's Coffee-house that the meeting took place, and it is to be hoped that Dryden appreciated the boy's enthusiasm. Dryden died in that very year; and it may well be said that his mantle and a double portion of his spirit fell upon Pope, who did not wait long before entering upon his poetical inheritance. The following are Pope's most famous works, given in the order in which they were composed and published: Essay on Criticism, Rape of the Lock, The Messiah, Translation of Homer's Iliad, Translation of part of Homer's Odyssey, The Dunciad, Essay on Man, Imitations of Horace.

The Essay on Criticism may be described as written in imitation of the Ars Poetica of Horace, but there is this difference between the writers-Horace was an experienced and practised poet, Pope a young man of twentythree when his poem was published. If the palm for originality be awarded to Horace, honour must also be given to the genius of the young poet, which enabled him to utter thoughts worthy of the matured wisdom of age. Many of the commonest quotations of modern life. are culled from the Essay on Criticism. culled

"A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”

To err, is human; to forgive, divine."

Perhaps the most extraordinary feature about Pope's early poetry is that it is as good, or almost as good, as that which he wrote when he was much older. There is the same harmony in the metre, the same polish in the language. It can hardly be maintained that added years brought with them any marked increase of power, of melody, or of taste.

The Rape of the Lock is a playful poem, mock heroic. It has been called the true epic of the Age of Anne, which was in many ways an artificial time. A young cavalier of the court cut a lock of hair from off the head of a beautiful maid of honour. The lady was naturally incensed, and Pope wrote this poem with a view to restoring peace. The place that the gods occupy in ancient epic poems, Pope supplies in this airy pleasantry with a whole system of sylphs and gnomes, and the subject is treated in so graceful a style that the poem may serve as

a model for this species of composition. It is itself