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MEMOIR.

LEXANDER POPE was born in
London, on the 21st of May, 1688,
twelve years before the death of
Dryden, the great poet whom he

was destined to succeed and to rival. His parents were devout Roman Catholics, and their boy, an only son, was almost wholly educated under private tuition. For a short time he attended a school at Twyford, and was then sent to one in London; but according to his own report he learned nothing at either. All the teaching he ever had "extended," he said, "a very little way," and he had the additional and far greater disadvantage of a crippled and feeble body, that made his life one "long disease." When Pope was twelve years old, his father left London to reside at Binfield, near Windsor, and there the youth who "lisped in numbers," discovered an ardent desire for knowledge. When in his fifteenth year, he went to London to learn French and Italian, but did not make much progress in either language during the few months of his London sojourn. Voltaire once said that Pope knew nothing of French; but if he was unable to speak the language, he appears to have read it

without difficulty, and was certainly familiar with Boileau, whose discretion as a satirist he would have been wise to follow. After this he taught himself both Greek and Latin. 66 I did not follow the grammar,” he said to his friend Spence, "but rather hunted in the authors for a syntax of my own, and then began translating any parts that pleased me particularly in the best Greek and Latin poets, and by that means formed my taste, which, I think, verily about sixteen was very nearly as good as it is now." Pope adds that in his "great reading period" at Binfield he went through all the best critics, almost all the English, French, and Latin poets of any name; the minor poets; Homer and some other of the greater Greek poets in the original, and Tasso and Ariosto in translations. His studies were desultory, but they were so severe that at seventeen he thought himself dying. Idleness and horse exercise, the pleasant remedies prescribed for him, happily proved successful, and he was able before long to return to his pursuits, and to poetry, the dearest of them all. When very young he had been taken to Will's coffee-house to see Dryden, and "who does not wish," says Dr. Johnson, "that Dryden could have known the value of the homage that was paid him, and foreseen the greatness of his young admirer?" Cowley said that the perusal of the " Faerie Queene" made him "irrecoverably a poet." That wonderful poem also charmed the youthful fancy of Pope, but it was Dryden and not Spenser who was destined to be his master, and he expressly states, as Gray stated himself at a later period, that he learnt versification wholly from Dryden's works. For the richer melody, if less regular verse of the Elizabethans, Pope had a regardless ear. He preferred the

smoothness of a well-worn road to the beauty and the difficulty of a rugged mountain track.

Apart from his weak health, Pope's boyish days and early manhood were singularly fortunate. He was tenderly nurtured, and repaid his parents' love with the warmest affection; he never suffered want, and had it not been for a painfully irritable temperament, and the overweening desire for fame that led him into crooked paths, his life might have been as happy as it was successful. He was yet in his teens when he discovered his vocation. Literature in the earlier years of the eighteenth century was a more prosperous calling than at a later period, when the scholar had to endure "toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail." Cut off from public life by his creed as well as by physical infirmities, it was Pope's sole ambition to be a poet and man of letters, and no one ever pursued his aim with more persistent determination. The genius of the precocious youth was soon recognized. Knowing Walsh,” the best critic in the nation according to Dryden, gave him advice and praise; Sir William Trumbull, formerly Secretary of State, who lived in Pope's neighbourhood, became, so far as youth and age can live together, a warm friend and companion, and Wycherley, the famous and dissolute Restoration dramatist, now an old man, was another and less trustworthy associate. This connection however was not of very long duration, and was severed when Pope was twenty-two. Wycherley asked Pope to correct his poems, and, if we may believe the poet's story, quarrelled with him in consequence, but in this instance as in many other cases, the version of facts given in Pope's correspondence may be in large measure delusive. It is quite possible that Wycherley

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