gentleman's family in Oxfordshire, the head of which was the Earl of Downe; his mother was the daughter of William Turner, Esq., of York. To this information, a relative of the poet added, that Pope's grandfather was a clergyman in Hampshire, who had two sons, the younger of whom, Alexander, the poet's father, was sent to Lisbon to be placed in a mercantile house, and that there he became a Roman Catholic. Recent researches have been directed to the poet's personal history, and it has been found that at the proper period (from 1631 to 1645), there was a Hampshire clergyman of the name of Alexander Pope, rector of Thruxton, and holding two other livings in the same county; but as there is no memorial of him in the church, and no entry in the register of his having had children, it is still doubtful whether this rector of Thruxton was an ancestor of the poet. The poet's maternal descent has been clearly traced.* His grandfather, Mr William Turner, held property in Yorkshire, including the manor of Towthorpe, which he inherited from his uncle. He was wealthy, but did not take rank amongst the gentry, as there is no mention of the Turner family in the Herald's Visitations. Of the reputed alliance with the Earls of Downe there is no proof; if the poet's family was of the same stock, it must have been two centuries before his birth, when the Popes, afterwards ennobled as Earls of Downe, were in the rank of humble yeomen. In 1677 the poet's father is found carrying on business as a linen-merchant in London, and having acquired a respectable competency by trade, and additional property by his marriage with Edith Turner-who enjoyed £70 per annum, a rent-charge on an estate in Yorkshire-he retired from business about the year 1688, to a small estate which he had purchased at Binfield, near Windsor. The poet was partly educated by the family priest. He was afterwards sent to a Catholic seminary at Twyford, near Winchester, where he lampooned his teacher, was severely whipped, and then removed to a small school in London, where he learned little or nothing. In his twelfth or thirteenth year, he returned home to * Critical and Historical Tracts, by Joseph Hunter, No. 5. London. 1857. Binfield, and devoted himself to a course of selfinstruction, and to the enthusiastic pursuit of literature. He delighted to remember that he had seen Dryden, and as Dryden died in 1700, his youthful admirer could not then have been more than twelve years of age. But Pope was then a poet. As yet a child, and all unknown to fame, I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. At the age of sixteen, he had commenced his Pastorals, translated part of Statius, and written imitations of Waller and other English poets. He soon became acquainted with some of the most eminent persons of the age-with Walsh, Wycherley, Congreve, Lansdowne, and Garth; and from this time his life was that of a popular poet enjoying high social distinction. His Pastorals were published in Tonson's Miscellany in 1709. In 1711 appeared his Essay on Criticism, unquestionably the finest piece of argumentative and reasoning poetry in the English language. The work is said to have been composed two years before publication, when Pope was only twenty-one. The ripeness of judgment which it displays is truly marvellous. Addison commended the Essay warmly in the Spectator, and it soon rose into great popularity. The style of Pope was now formed and complete. His versification was that of his master, Dryden, but he gave the heroic couplet a peculiar terseness, correctness, and melody. The Essay was shortly afterwards followed by the Rape of the Lock. The stealing of a lock of hair from a beauty of the day, Miss Arabella Fermor, by her lover, Lord Petre, was taken seriously, and caused an estrangement between the families, and. Pope wrote his poem to make a jest of the affair, and laugh them together again.' In this he did not succeed, but he added greatly to his reputation by the effort. The machinery of the poem, founded upon the Rosicrucian theory, that the elements are inhabited by spirits, which they called sylphs, gnomes, nymphs, and salamanders, was added in 1713, and forms the most perfect work of Pope's genius and art. Sylphs had been previously mentioned as invisible attendants on the fair, and the idea is shadowed out in Shakspeare's Ariel, and the amusements of the fairies in the Midsummer Night's Dream. But Pope has blended the most delicate satire with the most lively fancy, and produced the finest and most brilliant mock-heroic poem in the world. 'It is,' says Johnson, 'the most airy, the most ingenious, and the most delightful of all Pope's compositions.' In 1713 appeared his Windsor Forest, evidently founded on Denham's Cooper's Hill, which it far excels. Pope was, properly speaking, no mere descriptive poet. He made the picturesque subservient to views of historical events, or to sketches of life and morals. But most of the Windsor Forest being composed in his earlier years, amidst the shades of those noble woods which he selected for the theme of his verse, there is in this poem a greater display of sympathy with external nature and rural objects than in any of his other works. The lawns and glades of the forest, the russet plains, and blue hills, and even the 'purple dyes' of the 'wild heath,' had struck his young imagination. His account of the dying pheasant is a finished picture See! from the brake the whirring pheasant springs, The vivid green his shining plumes unfold, His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold? Another fine painting of external nature, as picturesque as any to be found in the purely descriptive poets, is the winter-piece in the Temple of Fame-a vision after Chaucer, published by Pope in 1715 So Zembla's rocks-the beauteous work of frost- Till the bright mountains prop the incumbent sky: Pope now commenced his translation of the Iliad, for which he issued proposals in 1713. It was published at intervals between 1715 and 1720. At first, the gigantic task oppressed him with its difficulty, but he grew more familiar with Homer's images and expressions, and in a short time was able to despatch fifty verses a day. Great part of the manuscript was written upon the backs and covers of letters, evincing that it was not without reason Swift called him paper-sparing Pope. The poet obtained a clear sum of £5320, 4s. by this translation. His exclamation And thanks to Homer, since I live and thrive, was, however, scarcely just, if we consider that this large sum was in part a 'benevolence' from the upper classes of society, designed to reward his literary merit. The fame of Pope was not advanced in an equal degree with his fortune by his labours as a translator. The 'fatal facility' of his rhyme, the additional false ornaments which he imparted to the ancient Greek, and his departure from the nice discrimination of character and speech which prevails in Homer, are faults now universally admitted. Cowper-though he failed himself in Homer-justly remarks, that the Iliad and Odyssey in Pope's hands 'have no more the air of antiquity than if he had himself invented them.' They still, however, maintain their popularity with the great mass of readers, and are unequalled in splendid versification. The Odyssey was not published until 1725, and Pope on this occasion called in the assistance of his poetical friends Broome and Fenton. These two coadjutors translated twelve books, and the notes were compiled by Broome, who received altogether from Pope a sum of £500: Fenton's share was only £240. Deducting the sums paid to his co-translators, Pope realised by the Odyssey £2885, 5s.; and together the Iliad and Odyssey had brought to the poet a fortune of from eight to nine thousand pounds-a striking instance of the princely patronage then extended to literature. While engaged with the Iliad, Pope removed from Binfield, his father having sold his estate there, and resided, from April 1716 till the beginning of 1718, at Chiswick. Here he collected and published his poetical works; and in this volume first appeared the most picturesque, melodious, and passionate of all his productions, the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, and the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard. The delicacy of the poet in veiling over the story of Abelard and Eloisa, and at the same time preserving the ardour of Eloisa's passion; the beauty of his imagery and descriptions; the exquisite melody of his versification, rising and falling like the tones of an Eolian harp, as he successively portrays the tumults of guilty love, the deepest 570 penitence, and the highest devotional rapture, have never been surpassed. If less genial tastes and a love of satire withdrew Pope from those fountainsprings of the muse, it was obviously from no want of power in the poet to display the richest hues of imagination, or the finest impulses of the human mind. At Chiswick, Pope's father died (October 23, 1717), and shortly afterwards he removed with his aged mother to Twickenham, where he had taken a lease of a house and grounds, and where he continued to reside during the remainder of his life. This classic spot, which Pope delighted to improve, and where he was visited by ministers of state, wits, poets, and beauties, is now greatly defaced-his house pulled down, and his pleasure-grounds broken up and vulgarised.* Having completed the Iliad, the poet's next great undertaking was an edition of Shakspeare, published in 1725 in six quarto volumes. The preface to this work is the best of his prose productions, but Pope failed as an editor. He wanted the requisite knowledge of Elizabethan literature, and the diligence necessary to collate copies and fix and illustrate the text. In 1727 and 1728, he published, in conjunction with his friend Swift, three volumes of Miscellanies, which drew down upon the authors a torrent of invective, lampoons, and libels, and led to the Dunciad by Pope. This elaborate and splendid satire was first printed in an imperfect form in May 1728, then enlarged with notes, the Prolegomena of Scriblerus, &c., and published in April 1729. The work displays the fertile invention of the poet, the variety of illustration at his command, and the unrivalled force and facility of his diction; but it is often indelicate, and still oftener unjust towards the miserable poets and critics against whom he waged war. 'I have often wondered,' says Cowper, 'that the same poet who wrote the Dunciad should have written these lines: That mercy I to others shew, * Pope's house was not large, but sufficiently commodious for the wants of an English gentleman whose friends visited himself rather than his dwelling, and who were superior to the necessity of stately ceremonial. On one side it fronted to the road, which it closely adjoined; on the other, to a narrow lawn sloping to the Thames. A piece of pleasure-ground, including a garden, was cut off by the public road; an awkward and unpoetical arrangement, which the proprietor did his best to improve, by constructing his grotto or passage below the highway. After the poet's death, the villa was purchased by Sir William Stanhope, and subsequently occupied by Lord Mendip; but, being in 1807 sold to the Baroness Howe, it was by that lady taken down, that a larger house might be built near its site. The grounds have suffered a complete change since Pope's time, and an obelisk which he erected to the memory of his mother, at their further extremity, has been removed. The only certain remnants of the poet's mansion are the vaults upon which it was built, three in number, the central one being connected with a tunnel, which, passing under the road, gives admission to the grounds; while the side ones are of the character of grottos, paved with square bricks, and stuck over with shells. It is curious to find over the central stone of the entrance into the left of these grottos, a large ammonite; and over the other, the piece of hardened clay in which its cast was left. Pope must have regarded these merely as curiosities, cr lusus naturæ, little dreaming of the wonderful tale of the early condition of our globe which they assist in telling. A short narrow piazza in front of the grottos is probably the evening colonnade' of the lines on the absence of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The taste with which Pope laid out his grounds at Twickenham (five acres in all), had a marked effect on English of his garden from the poet's; and Kent, the improver and landscape-gardening. The Prince of Wales took the design embellisher of pleasure-grounds, received his best lessons from Pope. He aided materially in banishing the stiff formal Dutch style. fame. Between the years 1731 and 1735, he had published his epistles to Burlington, Bathurst, Cobham, and Arbuthnot, and also his greatest ethical work, his Essay on Man, being part of a course of moral philosophy in verse which he projected. The Essay is now read, not for its philosophy, but for its poetry. Its metaphysical distinctions are neglected for those splendid passages and striking incidents which irradiate the poem. In lines like the following, he speaks with a mingled sweetness and dignity superior to his great master Dryden: Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutored mind He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire; But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, O Happiness! our being's end and aim, Which, still so near us, yet beyond us lies, And fled from monarchs, ST JOHN ! dwells with thee. Pope's future labours were chiefly confined to satire. Misfortunes were also now gathering round him. Swift was fast verging on imbecility, and was lost to the world; Atterbury and Gay died in 1732; and next year his venerable mother, whose declining years he had watched with affectionate solicitude, also expired. Between the years 1735 and 1739, Pope published his inimitable Imitations of Horace, satirical, moral, and critical, containing the most noble and generous sentiments, mixed up with withering invective and the fiercest denunciations. In 1742, he added a fourth book to the Dunciad, displaying the final advent of the goddess to destroy order and science, and to substitute the kingdom of the dull upon earth. The point of his individual satire, and the richness and boldness of his general design, attest the undiminished powers and intense feeling of the poet. Next year Pope prepared a new edition of the four books of the Dunciad, and elevated Colley Cibber to the situation of hero of the poem. This unenviable honour had previously been enjoyed by Theobald, a tasteless critic and commentator on Shakspeare; but in thus yielding to his personal dislike of Cibber, Pope injured the force of his satire. The laureate, as Warton justly remarks, with a great stock of levity, vanity, and affectation, had sense, and wit, and humour; and the author of the Careless Husband was by no means a proper king of the dunces.' Cibber was all vivacity and conceit-the very reverse of personified dulness, Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound. Political events came in the rear of this accumulated and vehement satire to agitate the last days of Pope. The anticipated approach of the Pretender led the government to issue a proclamation prohibiting every Roman Catholic from appearing within ten miles of London. The poet complied with the proclamation; and he was soon afterwards too ill to be in town. This 'additional proclamation from the Highest of all Powers,' as he terms his sickness, he submitted to without murmuring. A constant state of excitement, added to a life of ceaseless study and contemplation, operating on a frame naturally delicate and deformed from birth, had completely exhausted the powers of Pope. complained of his inability to think; yet, a short time before his death, he said: 'I am so certain of the soul's being immortal, that I seem to feel it within me as it were by intuition.' Another of his dying remarks was: There is nothing that is He meritorious but virtue and friendship; and, indeed, friendship itself is only a part of virtue.' He died at Twickenham on the 30th of May 1744. But without exaggerating his picturesqueness. The character and genius of Pope have given rise to abundance of comment and speculation. The occasional fierceness and petulance of his satire cannot be justified, even by the coarse attacks of his opponents, and must be ascribed to his extreme sensibility, to over-indulged vanity, and to a hasty and irritable temper. His sickly constitution debarring him from active pursuits, he placed too high a value on mere literary fame, and was deficient in the manly virtues of sincerity and candour. There was no artifice to which he was not willing to stoop to elevate his own reputation or lower that of an opponent. The most elaborate of his stratagems was that by which he published his correspond-in existence, and not by the class of subjects which ence, charging the publication upon some unknown literary burglar in alliance with Curll the bookseller. The whole of his literary history is indeed full of small plots and manoeuvring, and no reliance can be placed on his statements. He appreciated moral excellence-the feeling and the admiration were there-but the lower part of his nature was constantly dragging him down to little meannesses and duplicity. At the same time he was a public benefactor, by stigmatising the vices of the great, and lashing the absurd pretenders to taste and literature. He was a fond and steady friend; and in all our literary biography, there is nothing finer than his constant undeviating affection and reverence for his venerable parents. As a poet, it would be absurd to rank Pope with the greatest masters of the lyre; with the universality of Shakspeare, or the sublimity of Milton. He was undoubtedly more the poet of artificial life and manners than the poet of nature. He was a nice observer and an accurate describer of the phenomena of the mind and of the varying shades and gradations of vice and virtue, wisdom and folly. He was too fond of point and antithesis, but the polish of the weapon was equalled by its keenness. 'Let us look,' says Campbell, 'to the spirit that points his antithesis, and to the rapid precision of his thoughts, and we shall forgive him for being too antithetic and sententious.' His wit, fancy, and good sense, are as remarkable as his satire. His elegance has never been surpassed, or perhaps equalled: it is a combination of intellect, imagination, and taste, under the direction of an independent spirit and refined moral feeling. If he had studied more in the school of nature and of Shakspeare, and less in the school of Horace and Boileau; if he had cherished the frame and spirit in which he composed the Elegy and the Eloisa, and forgot his too exclusive devotion to that which inspired the Dunciad, the world would have hallowed his memory with a still more affectionate and permanent interest than even that which waits on him as one of our most brilliant and accomplished English poets. Mr Campbell in his Specimens has given an eloquent estimate of the general powers of Pope, with reference to his position as a poet: "That Pope was neither so insensible to the beauties of nature, nor so indistinct in describing them, as to forget the character of a genuine poet, is what I mean to urge, 572 he chooses, that we most fairly appreciate the genius or the life of life which is in him. It is no irreverence to the external charms of nature to say, that they are not more important to a poet's study than the manners and affections of his species. Nature is the poet's goddess; but by nature, no one rightly understands her mere inanimate face, however charming it may be, or the simple landscape-painting of trees, clouds, precipices, and flowers. Why, then, try Pope, or any other poet, exclusively by his powers of describing inanimate phenomena? Nature, in the wide and proper sense of the word, means life in all its circumstancesnature, moral as well as external. As the subject of inspired fiction, nature includes artificial forms and manners. Richardson is no less a painter of nature than Homer. Homer himself is a minute describer of works of art; and Milton is full of imagery derived from it. Satan's spear is compared to the pine, that makes "the mast of some great ammiral;" and his shield is like the moon, but like the moon artificially seen through the glass of the Tuscan artist. The "spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife, the royal banner, and all the quality, pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war," are all artificial images. When Shakspeare groups into one view the most sublime objects of the universe, he fixes on "the cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples." Those who have ever witnessed the spectacle of the launching of a ship-of-the-line, will perhaps forgive me for adding this to the examples of the sublime objects of artificial life. Of that spectacle I can never forget the impression, and of having witnessed it reflected from the faces of ten thousand spectators. They seem yet before me. I sympathise with their deep and silent expectation, and with their final burst of enthusiasm. It was not a vulgar joy, but an affecting national solemnity. When the vast bulwark sprang from her cradle, the calm water on which she swung majestically round, gave the imagination a contrast of the stormy element in which she was soon to ride. All the days of battle and nights of danger which she had to encounter, all the ends of the earth which she had to visit, and all that she had to do and to suffer for her country, rose in awful presentiment before the mind; and when the heart gave her a benediction, it was like one pronounced on a living being.' The Messiah. Ye nymphs of Solyma! begin the song: Rapt into future times, the bard begun : And white-robed Innocence from heaven descend. To leafless shrubs the flowery palms succeed, The lambs with wolves shall graze the verdant mead, And harmless serpents lick the pilgrim's feet. The smiling infant in his hand shall take The crested basilisk and speckled snake; Pleased, the green lustre of the scales survey, [The Toilet.] [From The Rape of the Lock.] And now, unveiled, the toilet stands displayed, [Description of Belinda and the Sylphs.] [From the same.] Not with more glories, in the ethereal plain, On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore, |