than invention. His imitations are so apparent, that it is part of his reader's employment to recall the verses of some former poet. Sometimes he copies the most popular writers, for he seems scarcely to endeavour at concealment; and sometimes he picks up fragments in obscure corners. His lines to Fenton, Serene, the sting of pain thy thoughts beguile, And make afflictions objects of a smile, brought to my mind some lines on the death of queen Mary, written by Barnes, of whom I should not have expected to find an imitator; But thou, O muse! whose sweet nepenthean tongue To detect his imitations were tedious and useless. What he takes he seldom makes worse; and he cannot be justly thought a mean man, whom Pope chose for an associate, and whose cooperation was considered by Pope's enemies as so important, that he was attacked by Henley with this ludicrous distich: Pope came off clean with Homer; but they say 9 Henley's joke was borrowed. In a copy of verses, entitled the Time Poets, preserved in a miscellany called Choice Drollery, 1656, are these lines: Sent by Ben Jonson, as some authors say, Broom went before, and kindly swept the way. J. B. POPE. ALEXANDER POPE was born in London, May 22, 1688, of parents whose rank or station was never ascertained: we are informed that they were of " gentle blood;" that his father was of a family of which the earl of Downe was the head; and that his mother was the daughter of William Turner, esquire, of York, who had, likewise, three sons, one of whom had the honour of being killed, and the other of dying, in the service of Charles the first; the third was made a general officer in Spain, from whom the sister inherited what sequestrations and forfeitures had left in the family. This, and this only, is told by Pope; who is more willing, as I have heard observed, to show what his father was not, than what he was. It is allowed that he grew rich by trade; but whether in a shop or on the exchange was never discovered till Mr. Tyers told, on the authority of Mrs. Racket, that he was a linendraper in the Strand. Both parents were papists. Pope was, from his birth, of a constitution tender and delicate; but is said to have shown remarkable gentleness and sweetness of disposition. The weakness of his body continued through his life; but the mildness of his mind, perhaps, ended with his childhood. His voice, when he was young, was so pleasing, that he was called, in fondness, "the little nightingale." This weakness was so great that he constantly wore stays, as I have been assured by a waterman at Twickenham, who, in lifting him into his boat, had often felt them. His method of taking the air on the water was to have a sedan chair in the boat, in which he sat with the glasses down. H. This opinion is warmly controverted by Roscoe, in his Life of Pope; and, perhaps, with justice; for, to adopt the words of D'Israeli, "Pope's literary warfare was really the wars of his poetical ambition more, perhaps, than of the petulance and strong irritability of his temper." See also sir Walter Scott's Swift, i. 316. ED. Being not sent early to school, he was taught to read by an aunt; and when he was seven or eight years old, became a lover of books. He first learned to write by imitating printed books; a species of penmanship in which he retained great excellence through his whole life, though his ordinary hand was not elegant. When he was about eight, he was placed in Hampshire, under Taverner ", a Romish priest, who, by a method very rarely practised, taught him the Greek and Latin rudiments together. He was now first regularly initiated in poetry by the perusal of Ogilby's Homer, and Sandys's Ovid. Ogilby's assistance he never repaid with any praise; but of Sandys he declared, in his notes to the Iliad, that English poetry owed much of its present beauty to his translations. Sandys very rarely attempted original composition. From the care of Taverner, under whom his proficiency was considerable, he was removed to a school at Twyford, near Winchester, and again to another school about Hydepark Corner; from which he used sometimes to stroll to the playhouse and was so delighted with theatrical exhibitions, that he formed a kind of play from Ogilby's Iliad, with some verses of his own intermixed, which he persuaded his schoolfellows to act, with the addition of his master's gardener, who personated Ajax. At the two last schools he used to represent himself as having lost part of what Taverner had taught him; and on his master at Twyford he had already exercised his poetry in a lampoon. Yet under those masters he translated more than a fourth part of the Metamorphoses. If he kept the same proportion in his other exercises, it cannot be thought that his loss was great. He tells of himself, in his poems, that, "he lisp'd in This is incorrect; his ordinary hand was certainly neat and elegant. I have some of it now before me. M. Pope's first instructer is repeatedly mentioned by Spence under the name of Banister, and described as the family priest. Spence's Anecd. 259. 283. Singer's edit. Roscoe's Pope, i. 11. ED. numbers;" and used to say that he could not remember the time when he began to make verses. In the style of fiction it might have been said of him as of Pindar, that when he lay in his cradle, "the bees swarmed about his mouth." About the time of the revolution, his father, who was undoubtedly disappointed by the sudden blast of Popish prosperity, quitted his trade, and retired to Binfield, in Windsor forest, with about twenty thousand pounds; for which, being conscientiously determined not to entrust it to the government, he found no better use than that of locking it up in a chest, and taking from it what his expenses required; and his life was long enough to consume a great part of it, before his son came to the inheritance. To Binfield Pope was called by his father, when he was about twelve years old; and there he had, for a few months, the assistance of one Deane, another priest, of whom he learned only to construe a little of Tully's Offices. How Mr. Deane could spend, with a boy who had translated so much of Ovid, some months over a small part of Tully's Offices, it is now vain to inquire. Of a youth so successfully employed, and so conspicuously improved, a minute account must be naturally desired : but curiosity must be contented with confused, imperfect, and, sometimes, improbable intelligence. Pope, finding little advantage from external help, resolved, thenceforward, to direct himself, and at twelve formed a plan of study, which he completed with little other incitement than the desire of excellence. His primary and principal purpose was to be a poet, with which his father accidentally concurred, by proposing subjects, and obliging him to correct his performances by many revisals; after which the old gentleman, when he was satisfied, would say, "these are good rhymes." In his perusal of the English poets he soon distinguished the versification of Dryden, which he considered as the model to be studied, and was impressed with such veneration for his instructer, that he persuaded some friends to take him to the coffee-house which Dryden frequented, and pleased himself with having seen him. Dryden died May 1, 1701, some days before Pope was twelve; so early must he, therefore, have felt the power of harmony, and the zeal of genius. Who does not wish that Dryden could have known the value of the homage that was paid him, and foreseen the greatness of his young admirer? The earliest of Pope's productions is his Ode on Solitude, written before he was twelve, in which there is nothing more than other forward boys have attained, and which is not equal to Cowley's performances at the same age. His time was now wholly spent in reading and writing. As he read the classicks, he amused himself with translating them; and, at fourteen, made a version of the first book of the Thebais, which, with some revision, he afterwards published. He must have been, at this time, if he had no help, a considerable proficient in the Latin tongue. By Dryden's Fables, which had then been not long published, and were much in the hands of poetical readers, he was tempted to try his own skill in giving Chaucer a more fashionable appearance, and put January and May, and the Prologue of the Wife of Bath, into modern English. He translated, likewise, the epistle of Sappho to Phaon, from Ovid, to complete the version which was before imperfect; and wrote some other small pieces, which he afterwards printed. He sometimes imitated the English poets, and professed to have written at fourteen, his poem upon Silence, after Rochester's Nothing. He had now formed his versification, and in the smoothness of his numbers surpassed the original but this is a small part of his praise; he discovers such acquaintance both with human life and publick affairs, as is not easily conceived to have been attainable by a boy of fourteen in Windsor forest. Next year he was desirous of opening to himself new * Dryden died May 1, 1700, a year earlier than Johnson supposed. M. |