ing to that with which a House of Commons endeavoured to hunt down a pulpit Xanthippe, and a Secretary of State entered upon a crusade against the pygmies of the press. Statesman and man of letters-there was little as to true generosity of spirit to choose between the two1. The comparative smallness of the literary world may help to account for the importance with which its members invested even their most trivial disputes. But few escaped the taint of their age, and nothing in the life of Addison strikes his contemporaries as so remarkable, as the fact that he forgives his enemies before composing himself for an exemplary death. The commonest courtesies of literary life which even Bavius and Mavius would not have permitted themselves to neglect, are defiantly violated by our Augustans. Anonymity, far from serving as a cover against nominal recriminations, is in truth resorted to only as an evasion of an uncertain law; and cowardice too frequently skulks behind a lampoon, as a literary weapon no more fitting than the bludgeons hired by Rochester for his Rose Alley ambuscade. How imperfectly had Dryden's successors learnt to imitate the example of one who truthfully declared that 'he had seldom answered any scurrilous lampoon, and,' though 'naturally vindictive, had suffered in silence, and possessed his soul in quiet."

That a healthy current of life was still flowing in the nation's veins, in despite of the vices which seemed to pervade society, is of course a fact to which our literature alone bears sufficient testimony. From out of the sphere of the middle classes a reaction had been preparing itself. Its direction was towards that close obedience to the divine law as a practical, if possible a literal, fingerpost in all relations of life which is in accordance with the Puritan spirit of the nation, and which was in due time to force itself upon the classes long in their own opinion practically emancipated from its control. De Foe and his lineal literary descendants, the essayists and novelists, succeeded in saving its national character to our literature. But an examination of their influence and the gradual progress of its operation would be out of place here. As the age appears to us in the mirror of the literature which professedly and unhesitatingly attached itself to the world of politics, fashion and learning, it is an unnatural age, because licentious in every direction except that of the form which by its own authority it has chosen as the exponent of its very spirit and essence. All the emotions of the Augustans, except their hatreds, seem shallow and transitory, and most of all so in their literary expression. Men who estimate their neighbours according to a selfish standard, necessarily adjust to it their measures of praise as well as of blame. Queen Anne, whose childish dependence upon others was no secret even to herself, is addressed in strains of uncompromising panegyric before which even the tributes of the Cavaliers to the Rose of

1 Bolingbroke, as Secretary of State, writes to the Queen in 1711: 'I have discovered the author of another scandalous libel, who will be in custody this afternoon; he will make the 13th I have seized, and the 15th I have found out.' Swift writes in his Journal to Stella of the same year:

'One Boyer, a French dog, has abused me in a pamphlet, and I have got him up in a messenger's hands; the Secretary promises me to swinge him. I must make that rogue an example for warning to others.' See Macknight's Life of Bolingbroke.

Bohemia grow pale. Even Prior is recklessly dull when he begins to flatter1 ex officio; even Young's unctuous religiosity adapts itself to the exigencies of a courtly veneration2. Nor was it only loyalty which was thus galvanised into a spasmodic existence. Dryden had scattered panegyrics with the profuse vigour belonging to his genial abandon; his successors swung their censers in honour of their ‚ minor divinities with the measured oscillations of drilled acolytes; and even a : Wharton had his poet-in-ordinary. The amatory verse of the age is perhaps the most unnatural that has ever been written; instead of exhausting itself on even ruby lips and dainty feet, it hovers with inquisitive placidity round ladies' fans or lapdogs or paper-knives. The ladies themselves could hardly be natural without falling into downright cynicism; and passed an existence as unreal as their outward selves, made up as they were of powders and patches, and fenced in with hurdles of whalebone. The real epos of society under Queen Anne, though designed as a burlesque, is Pope's Rape of the Lock. Under the first two Georges the coating of varnish grew thinner and thinner; but the material remained equally rotten beneath.

Such as these were, if I rightly estimate the characteristics of the age in so far as he was brought into contact with it, the conditions under which Pope entered upon and led his literary life. Its course could not fail to be affected and in some degree determined by them.. Yet the chief element in the story of his life, as in the stories. of all human lives, remains. of course the gradual development of his own individuality, and the unconscious compromise ultimately effected between it and the influences which surrounded him. Of his triumphant struggle against difficulties of no ordinary significance, and of his single-minded devotion to the task which his genius hand marked out for him, his life, however imperfectly told, cannot fail to offer clear and abundant testimony. It intertwines itself almost inseparably with his works; for Pope, as has been well said 3, was a literary man, as Garrick was an actor, pure and simple. And life and works viewed together will, I think, irresistibly lead to the conclusion that Pope belonged to that second order of great writers, who return to their age the seeds which it has sown in them, grown and tended into magnificent fruits; not to that other and assuredly higher order, whose genius is not receptive and reproductive only, but creative, and of whom England was barren in its so-called Augustan age.

1 See, besides his well-known Ode to the Queen, the Epistle desiring the Queen's picture, characteristically 'left unfinished, by the sudden news of H. M. death.'

2 See above all the exordium of his Last Day; besides his poems on the accession of George I.

and II. respectively.

3 By Dibdin, in his History of the Stage. In this sense Warburton might justly write to Garrick: 'Nobody but you and Pope ever knew how to preserve the dignity of your respective employments.' Fitzgerald's Life of Garrick, chap. v.

I.

Much that is peculiar in the life and literary career of Pope is accounted for by the circumstances of his birth and education.

Alexander Pope was born on the twenty-first of May of the year 1688, in Lombard Street in the city of London. Of his father and namesake it is known with certainty that he realised in the linen-trade a fortune sufficient to enable him to retire from business at a comparatively early period in life, and at his death to leave behind him an income which has been variously estimated, but which at all events sensibly added to the worldly ease of his son. That the elder Pope was a devoted member of the Church of Rome, is equally undoubted; we find his son in his earlier letters referring to the pious habits prevailing in his family; and passages in the poetry of the son1 picture the father's life as spent in cheerful resignation to the lot in those days incumbent upon adherents to the persecuted ancient faith. That Pope's father was a convert to the Church in which he lived and brought up his son, is a mere piece of hearsay built upon another piece of hearsay to the effect that the poet's grandfather was a clergyman of the Church of England. Though antiquarian zeal has sought to identify this supposed Anglican clerical grandsire in the person of an Alexander Pope, rector of Thruxton in Hampshire, who died in the year 1645, there is nothing beyond a mere conjecture to justify the application of an intrinsically uninteresting discovery. The poet no doubt claimed kindred with the family bearing his name formerly ennobled as earls of Downe; but as the family in question was entirely extinct in the male line, it is at best possible that the two families had at some former period been more or less closely connected. There is just as much and as little reason to assume that the poet was descended from a Scotch branch of the Popes; the foundation of the claim resting chiefly on the two facts that there have been Catholic Popes in Scotland, and that an enthusiastic Presbyterian namesake of the poet vaguely asserted a kind of kinsmanship with the latter in his lifetime.

The maiden name of Pope's mother was Edith Turner. She was the daughter of William Turner, a Roman Catholic gentleman of good position, and lord of the manor of Towthorpe in Yorkshire. He was the father of no less than seventeen children, of whom Pope's mother survived all the rest. She died at the age of 93, in 1733, affectionately mourned in death as she had been tenderly cherished throughout his life by her son. On a monument which he erected to her he recorded her character as that of the best of mothers and most loving of women?. Dr Johnson, in whose large heart the sentiment of piety sat enthroned, generously observes of Pope under this aspect, that 'life has, among its soothing and quiet comforts, few things better to give than such a son.' Of William Turner's children some were

Epistle to Arbuthnot, vv. 394 ff. Imit. of Hor. bk. 11. Ep. II. vv. 54 ff.

2 No attention need be paid to Mrs Piozzi's statement that Pope's mother was

'a poor

feebleminded thing, unworthy anyone's care or esteem. Hayward, Autobiography and Remains of Mrs Piozzi, II. 154.

brought up as Protestants and some Catholics; but it cannot be doubted that Pope's mother was among the latter number. Her attachment to the Catholic faith seemed to her son a sufficient argument to outweigh all the inducements to conversion urged upon him, after his father's death, by Atterbury. Thus his attitude towards the church in which he was nurtured invariably remained that of a cheerful outward acquiescence, whatever at times may have been his views in regard to creeds and churches in general1.

On retiring from business, the elder Pope, after residing for a time at Kensington, finally took up his abode at Binfield, on the border of Windsor Forest, and about nine miles distant from the royal castle and town. Here he remained, in modest but comfortable circumstances until the year 1716, when the family removed to Chiswick, little more than a year before his death. Whatever may have been his own earlier history, he was a kind and indulgent parent to his precocious only son, the development of whose tastes and tendencies the father seems at times to have been fain to moderate, but never to check. When the son affected

the art of painting, his father placed no obstacles in his way; when he adopted literature as the calling of his life, his father with equal readiness acquiesced in this hazardous choice. He never appears to have intended that his son should engage in trade; and even had the delicate and sickly nature of the latter admitted of his following one of the learned professions, all were closed to him by the circumstance of his creed. With his father Pope shared the love of gardening, which, notwithstanding many absurd excrescences, was one of the healthiest tastes of the times, and in which he was afterwards, after a fashion of his own, to indulge in the fantastic laying-out of his Twickenham villa.

Among the many precocious children of whom we read in literary and artistic biography (and precocity is as frequent here as it is rare in the case of future great statesmen; for talents unfold themselves amidst tranquil surroundings, but to fashion a character are needed the storms of the world 2), Pope was assuredly one of the most precocious. At five years of age he had already displayed sufficient signs of promise to be chosen by an aunt as the reversionary legatee of all her books, pictures and medals. His education in its beginnings and progress corresponds very closely with its ultimate results. Pope was by necessity rather than choice a self-educated man; and he never became a scholar. Science may number self-taught geniuses among her chief luminaries; of scholarship, as the term implies, discipline is an indispensable element. Pope taught himself writing by copying from printed books, and hence acquired at least one external mark of scholarly habits, the practice of minute calligraphy crowded into nooks and corners of paper-—a practice which afterwards in Pope's case almost developed itself into a mania and obtained for him from Swift the epithet of 'paper-sparing' Pope. And as he passed onward from the first rudiments,

The above summary is based on a comparison of Carruthers with various antiquarian tracts on the parentage and family of Pope by J., Hunter and R. Davies, Goethe's Tasso.

his education remained very much a matter of chance. From the family priest (it is very touching to find how few of these Roman Catholic families lacked the ministration of one of the persecuted servants of their Church), whose name was Banister, he learnt the accidence of Latin and Greek, when eight years of age; and afterwards successively attended two small Catholic schools, one at Twyford near Winchester, which he is said to have left in disgrace after fleshing upon its master the youthful weapon of his satire, the other in London, kept by a convert of the name of Deane, whose principle of education seems to have been as far as possible removed from that of unremitting personal superintendence. About this time must be dated the famous incident of the boy Pope's visit to Will's Coffee-house, the sole occasion (according to his account to Spence) on which he ever beheld Dryden.

Quitting Mr Deane's seminary for his father's house at Binfield, Pope, now twelve or thirteen years of age, brought with him little or no accurate learning, but tastes already developed and a literary ambition already active. At about eight years of age he had translated part of Statius, who next to Virgil continued through life his favourite Latin poet; and at twelve he had composed a play founded on the Iliad. At Twyford he had prepared himself for this effort by the study of Ogilby's Homer, followed by that of Sandys' Ovid; and now that he was left to follow the bent of his own inclinations, his studies continued to pursue the same direction. 'Considering,' he told Spence, 'how very little I had when I came from school, I think I may be said to have taught myself Latin, as well as French, or Greek; and in all these my chief way of getting them was by translation'.' Translation without guidance is the ruin of accurate scholarship; but it is not Pope or his father, it is the penal statutes against Catholic teachers which are to be held accountable for his having availed himself of the only method left open to his use.

It is to this period that we must ascribe the first of his preserved juvenile pieces. Though he had no public, the tonic of common sense appears to have been occasionally administered by his father; and the sense of rhythm was a gift which had been bestowed upon him by nature, together with a general correctness of taste in the choice of words and expressions which his preference for poetical over prose reading could not fail to heighten. To these causes must be ascribed the extraordinary and perhaps unparalleled fact that there is little vital difference, so far as form is concerned, between some of the earliest and some of the latest of Pope's productions. His early pieces lack the vigour of wit and the brilliancy of antithesis of his later works; but they have the same felicity of expression, and the same easy flow of versification. It is only in the management of rhymes that Pope's earliest productions are comparatively negligent. We have it on Pope's own authority, as related by Spence, that some of the couplets in an epic poem on the subject of Alcander, prince of Rhodes, which he begun soon after his twelfth birthday, were afterwards inserted by

1 Even the Latin scholarship of Pope accordingly appears to have been of a somewhat unsound description. See e.g. the strange quotation from

Horace among the 'Imitations,' noted by Pope in his Temple of Fame (p. 126 of the present edition).