education was intrusted to a Catholic priest, through whom he acquired the elements of Latin and Greek. He afterwards had other instructors, but the most valuable part of his education was that which he obtained without the aid of any master. He was a voracious reader, and if his knowledge, like that of most self-educated men, was destitute of minute accuracy, it was, at any rate, much wider than is at all common. He had a good knowledge of Latin, a fair share of Greek, knew French well, and at one time studied Italian to some extent.

His crooked frame and weak health debarred Pope from the usual sports of childhood; and when, in his early years, his father retired to Binfield in Windsor Forest, where he had purchased a small estate, the ambitious boy began earnestly the practice of that art which was to be the toil and the pleasure of his life. When little more than twelve he commenced an epic poem, of which he wrote about four thousand verses. Other compositions preceded and followed this large undertaking, all of which were submitted to his father, who, when he found them defective, would request him to "new-turn them,” saying, “These be not good rhymes." When very young he managed to become acquainted with some of the leading men of letters in London, to whom he wrote carefully composed letters in the artificial style then prevalent, and by whom he seems, in spite of his youth, to have been regarded as an equal. Among these was Wycherley, who submitted some verses to the revision of the youthful critic, who pointed out their faults with such unsparing rigour that Wycherley was not unnaturally offended. Another was Walsh, "Knowing Walsh," as Pope calls him, a poetaster of the day, who was much esteemed as a critic. Having read some of Pope's verses, he advised him to aim especially at correctness, for, said he, "We have had several great poets, but we never had one great poet who was correct." This well-meant advice was never forgotten by Pope. In 1709 Pope published his first poems, the "Pastorals," which had been for some time handed about among poets and critics. They were well received at the time, Walsh declaring "that 'tis no flattery at all to say that Virgil had

Pope's "Essay on Criticism."

187

written nothing so good at his age," but they are now generally regarded as Pope's poorest compositions, being artificial, absurd, and wearisome. Two years after came the "Essay on Criticism," which shows a great advance in more ways than one. The versification is exact and polished, the style clear and epigrammatic, the illustrations various and well selected. As regards the value of the subject-matter of this poem, critics have differed widely. "If he had written nothing else," says Johnson, "this would have placed him among the first critics. and the first poets, as it exhibits every mode of excellence that can embellish or justify didactic composition-selection of matter, novelty of arrangement, justness of precept, splendour of illustration, and propriety of digression." De Quincey, on the other hand, thought it "the feeblest and least interesting of Pope's writings, being substantially a mere versification, like a metrical multiplication table, of commonplaces the most mouldy with which criticism has baited her rat-traps." The truth is, that our judgment of the poem will depend upon the point of view from which we regard it. Pope's precepts are not original, though they are generally sound enough; but they are so well and strikingly put that they come home to us with a new force. A wanton attack on Dennis, under the name of "Appius," in the "Essay on Criticism," brought on the first of the long series of literary squabbles in which Pope was impli cated. Dennis rejoined in a furious pamphlet, in which, alluding to Pope's deformed figure, he declared that "he may extol the ancients, but he has reason to thank the gods that he was born a modern; for had he been born of Grecian parents, and his father consequently had by law had the absolute disposal of him, his life had been no longer than that of one of his poems, the life of half a day." If opinions have differed as to the merits of the "Essay on Criticism," there has been but one judgment on the "Rape of the Lock." It was published in 1712,1 and, as is well known, was founded on a frolic of Lord Petre's, who had cut off a lock of Miss Arabelia

The version published in 1712 is only a fir t sketch. It appeared in a lume of miscellaneous poems.

Fermor's hair. His gallantry offending the lady and breaking off the intercourse of the two families, Pope was asked by a common friend to do something to effect a reconciliation. The result of this request was the best mock-heroic poem in the language. The first edition wanted the supernatural machinery, one of the greatest attractions of the work, and some excellent passages which were added in the second edition (1714). It is perhaps Pope's most universally pleasing performance-light, easy, graceful, full of delicate satirical touches, never flagging in interest, and having the additional merit of giving us an accurate picture of the fashionable society of Queen Anne's time. "Pope's adaptation of his airy refulgent sylphs to the ephemeral trivialities of fashionable life, the admirable art with which he fitted his fairy machinery to the follies and commonplaces of a giddy London day, the poetic grace which he threw around his sarcastic narrative, and which unites with it as naturally as does the rose with its thorny stem, are all unborrowed beauties, and consummate in their kind." Not long after the "Rape of the Lock," Pope wrote a poem in a very different style, the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard," which is also one of the brightest jewels in his poetic crown. We do not look to Pope for the successful expression of deep, passionate feeling; he is pre-eminently a poet of artificial society, of nature as seen in clubs and coffee-houses and in fashionable town assemblages. Yet it cannot be denied that in the "Epistle of Eloisa" he shows himself possessed of a vein of genuine pathos and tenderness. The hand of the artist is, indeed, a little too apparent in its smooth couplets and neatly turned phrases, but it is, at any rate, always the hand of a master of his art.

In 1713 Pope, whose fame was now widespread, entered upon the most fortunate undertaking of his life, his translation of the "Iliad." It was with many doubts and fears that he began his task. "In the beginning of my translating Homer," he told his faithful chronicler, Spence, "I wished anybody would hang me a hundred times. It sat so very heavily on my mind at first that I often used to dream of it, and even do

Pope's Translation of Homer.

189 so sometimes still to this day. My dream usually was that I had set out on a very long journey, puzzled which way to take, and full of fears that I should never get to the end of it." De Quincey thinks that Pope's trepidation when he commenced translating the "Iliad” was owing to his defective knowledge of the Greek language, and this opinion is very probably correct. As the work advanced, practice brought facility, until at length he was able to translate fifty lines a day. It had been decided that the translation should be published by subscription, and Pope's friends exerted themselves to the utmost to procure subscribers. There is an amusing anecdote of how, in a coffee-house in 1713, Swift was seen informing “a young nobleman that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope (a Papist), who had begun a translation of Homer into English verse, for which he must have them all subscribe; 'for,' says he, 'the author shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for him."" In 1720, when Pope had reached his thirtysecond year, the translation was completed. Its success surpassed all the high hopes that had been formed of it. Altogether the work produced £5320, which would now represent a purchasing power of at least double that amount. Of the worth of the translation, a sufficiently correct judgment was expressed by Richard Bentley, the greatest classical scholar England has ever seen. "It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope," he is recorded to have said, "but you must not call it Homer." Pope's genius was, in truth, singularly un-Homeric; nothing can be imagined more different from his polished artificiality than the grand simplicity of the Greek bard. Yet, full as Pope's "Iliad" is of faults which jar against a pure literary taste, it may fairly claim to have done good service. thousands unacquainted with Greek it has afforded at least a glimpse of the old heroic world painted by Homer, and even yet, though now surrounded by so many competitors, it is perhaps to the average reader the most attractive translation. Elated with his success, Pope determined to translate the "Odyssey" also. To aid him in his task he engaged two assistants, Broome and Fenton, by whom twelve books out of

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the twenty-four were translated. The work was finished in 1725, and was very profitable, though it did not realise nearly so much as the "Iliad." It is a striking proof of how usual an accomplishment the art of writing the heroic couplet had now become to find that it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish by internal evidence passages of the "Odyssey" translated by Broome and Fenton, from passages translated by Pope. With the money acquired by his translation of the "Iliad,” Pope bought the cottage at Twickenham, where he resided for the remainder of his days, and where he was often visited by the most notable men of the day, Swift, Bolingbroke, Arbuthnot, Lord Peterborough, and many others. In 1728 he published the "Dunciad," in which he lashed mercilessly the minor scribblers of his day, and discharged venomous shafts of ridicule against all who had at any time assaulted him. Between 1733 and 1738 he published the various pieces which, when his works were first collected, constituted the volume entitled "Satires and Epistles of Horace Imitated." These so-called "imitations" contain some of his most vigorous writing-the matchless portrait of Addison under the name of Atticus; the stinging and vindictive lines in which Lord Hervey is pilloried under the name of Sporus ; and the touching passage which commemorates his filial piety. In his satires, Pope pretended to be inspired by a genuine indignation against vice. But it was not so in reality; he used satire as a means of gratifying private revenge, not because the villanies of mankind stirred him up to write. "Pope was contented enough," says De Quincey, "with society as he found it; bad it might be, but it was good enough for him. It was the merest selfdelusion if, at any moment, the instinct of glorying in his satiric mission persuaded him that in his case it might be said, Facit indignatio versum. Pope having no internal principle of wrath boiling in his breast, being really in the most pacific and charitable frame of mind to all scoundrels whatsoever, was a hypocrite when he conceited himself to be in a dreadful passion with offenders as a body." One of the most common topics of his ridicule is poverty, which is certainly no fit theme tur