POPE 



323 



Pope, ALEXANDER, the greatest poet of bis 

 age, and the most brilliant satirist that England, 

 or perhaps the world, has ever produced, was born 

 in London on the 21st of May 188. He was of 

 good middle-class parentage, but not, as he after- 

 wards characteristically endeavoured to make out, 

 of aristocratic descent. His grandfather, Alexander 

 Pope the elder whose pedigree he attempted to 

 derive, though on very inadequate evidence, from 

 the Earls of Doune was a clergyman of the Church 

 of England. His son, the poet's father, was placed 

 with a merchant at Lisbon, where he became a 

 convert to the Roman Catholic Church. On his 

 return from Lislxjn he seems to have followed the 

 trade of a linen-draper in Broad Street, whence, 

 after his marriage with Edith Turner, the poet's 

 mother, he migrated to Lombard Street. Here, 

 on the above-mentioned date once the subject of 

 much perplexing controversy, but now satisfac- 

 torily ascertained Alexander the younger first saw 

 the light. In his infancy, and indeed np to the 

 age of ten, he does not seem to have been either 

 weakly or deformed. In the opinion of a kinsman, 

 ' it was the perpetual application he fell into in his 

 twelfth year that changed his form and ruined his 

 constitution ; ' and it is possible that this may 

 have contributed to and aggravated a misfortune 

 which could hardly have oeen due to any such 

 cause alone. It is at any rate certain that Pope's 

 application to study must have been both early 

 and intense, for deep traces of thought and culture 

 are no less conspicuous than natural precocity of 

 genius even in his most juvenile poems; an<t he 

 certainly owed little to his teachers. His educa- 

 tion, thank* no iloubt to the disabilities created by 

 his inherited creed, was unmethodical and imper- 

 fect to the last degree. He seems to have passed 

 from one incapable Catholic priest and ill-ordered 

 Catholic seminary to another, until at twelve years 

 of age he was removed, knowing little more appar- 

 ently than the Latin and Greek rudiments, to Bin- 

 field near Wokingham, to which place his father 

 had by that time retired. Yet in this very year he 

 wrote his Ode on Solitude, an insignificant but not 

 unpromising j>erforinance, and at fourteen, accord- 

 ing to his own account, lie composed the poem on 

 *> If nrr, in imitation of Rochester's Nothing, which 

 l>oth in manner and matter is astonishingly mature. 

 It was at the same age that he. produced the first 

 of his works which attracted attention, a Transla- 

 tion of the First Book of the Thebais of Statins, a 

 poem memorable above its intrinsic merits from the 

 fact that in it the English heroic couplet, though of 

 course falling far short of the technical perfection 

 to which Pope afterwards brought it, is already 

 beginning to take the new mould into which, in his 

 hands, it was destined to be recast. It is during 

 the next two years, that is to say, at the marvel- 

 lously early age of from sixteen to eighteen, that 

 Pope s career as a recognised English poet may be 

 said to begin. For it was at some time during 

 these years (1704-6) that he wrote his Pastorals, 

 which, though not published till 1709, were shown 

 to and highly commended by all the leading critics 

 of the day, and were the means of bringing their 

 young author acquainted with the dramatist 

 Wycherley, then advanced in years, with whom he 

 commenced a singular correspondence, the tenor of 

 which he audaciously misrepresented in later life. 



It was to Wycherley, too, that Pope owed 

 his first introduction, which took place a little 

 later, to London life, where the youth's extra- 

 ordinary talents were quickly recognised, and 

 where he was not long in establishing a friend- 

 ship with Addison, Steele, Swift, Arbuthnot, and 

 other famous wits and poets of the day. In 1711 

 he published his Essay on Criticism, a poem 

 which, whether written in 1709 or 1707 and it 



may have been his invincible habit of committing 

 small acts of dishonesty for still smaller gains 

 that suggested the antedating of the composition 

 was a sufficiently splendid achievement for the age 

 either of nineteen or twenty-one. It at once, or 

 nearly at once for it hung for a little at first at 

 the booksellers placed him in the front rank of the 

 men of letters of his time.- Critical opinions differed, 

 and down to our own day have continued to differ, 

 as to the degree of merit possessed by this remark- 

 able poem in respect of its matter some depre- 

 ciating its critical aphorisms as platitudes, others 

 elevating them into utterances of gnomic wisdom ; 

 but its excellences of form are not open to question 

 in any competent judgment. Young as was its 

 author, even on the highest computation of his 

 age, his style had already reached maturity, and 

 his matchless power of expression is here exhibited, 

 if over a less varied subject-matter, yet certainly 

 with a no less unerring mastery than in any of his 

 later works. The year 1713 witnessed the publica- 

 tion of Windsor Forest ( written, according to Pope's 

 account adopted by Warburton, in 1709), a piece 

 much admired in its day for the accuracy and force 

 in its descriptions of nature ; and this was suc- 

 ceeded in the following year by the poem on which 

 Pope's claim to the gift of poetic imagination may 

 perhaps lie most securely rested, the Rape of the 

 Lock. Necessarily precluded by the deliberate 

 triviality of its subject from appealing to the 

 higher emotions which imaginative poetry of the 

 serious order arouses, this piece displays, in addition 

 to the exquisite charm of its versification, a grace 

 of delicate fancy which at times almost recalls the 

 creator of Puck and Ariel, and the diviner of the 

 dream-whispers of Queen Mab. 



We now reach the commencement of what was 

 probably the happiest and most prosperous period 

 of the poet's life. His brilliant success had not 

 yet brought with it much pecuniary profit, but in 

 the year 1713 a project was set on foot by him, 

 and warmly supported by Swift and others of his 

 friends, which w;is destined not only to add to his 

 fame, but to place his fortunes on a substantial 

 lias is for life. This was the translation of the 

 I/i'i't, a work published by subscription, in six 

 volumes, intended to appear yearly ; the last 

 two, as a matter of fact, were issued together 

 after six years' intermission in 1720. Most im- 

 perfectly representative, as might be expected, of 

 its great original, it is nevertheless a poem so 

 remarkable for its union of force and elegance, and 

 one which moves with an animation so inspiriting 

 and u n (lagging, that it can be read to-day with no 

 inconsiderable portion of the pleasure which it 

 gave to the contemporaries of the poet. The year 

 of its composition was among the fullest and 

 busiest of Pope's life. In 1716 nis father removed 

 from Binfield to a house at Chiswick, where he 

 resided till his death in the following year. Pope 

 was now the foremost of the literary lions of 

 fashionable London, and almost as conspicuous a 

 personage in the drawing-rooms of ministers and 

 magistrates as in the coffee-houses of the wits. 

 At this period, too, his mind, save for an interval 

 of natural grief at the loss of his father, was prob- 

 ably as easy as his circumstances. Political 

 differences, aggravated by well or ill-founded sus- 

 picions of the elder writer's jealousy of the younger, 

 had alienated Pope from Addison ; but, though he 

 had already begun his almost life-long quarrel with 

 the eccentric John Dennis, it had not yet taken on 

 a character of any very extreme virulence. In 

 1718 he purchased out of the early profits of the 

 Iliad the famous villa and grounds at Twicken- 

 ham, which he occupied till his death. 



A translation of the Odyssey, less successful be- 

 cause largely 'farmed out' to inferior hands, was 



