POPE, Alexander, English poet: b. in Lom bard street, London, 21 May 1688; d. at Twick enham on the Thames, Middlesex, 30 May 1744. His parents were Roman Catholics. His father, to whom the poet ascribed a not•yet-established connection with the Earls of Downe, was a linen-draper "who dealt in Hollands wholesale' ; his mother, Edith Turner, a second wife, was the daughter of William Turner, of Towthorpe, in Yorkshire. About 1700, Pope's father, hav ing prospered in his business, retired to a small property he had purchased at Binfield, in Wind sor Forest. Pope was not a strong child. When he was born his parents were no longer young; and from his father he inherited a frail constitution, from his mother a life-long tend ency to headache. But he had in his boyhood, and retained through life, a voice like a night ingale. His education was desultory and mostly derived from Romish ecclesiastics. Writ ing he taught himself by copying type. From his first school at Twyford, near Winchester, he was removed because he had been severely punished for lampooning his master at the tender age of nine. At a subsequent school in London, kept by one Thomas Deane, he learned little; but he gave a taste of his future quality by tacking together an acting play from Ogilby's Homer, in which the school gardener personated Ajax. Leaving Deane, he became the director of his own studies at his home in the Forest. Here it is worth while to let him speak for him self : "When I had done with my priests, I took to reading by myself, for which I had a great eagerness and enthusiasm, especially for poetry; and in a few years I had dipped into a great number of the English, French, Italian, Latin and Greek poets. This I did without any design, but that of pleasing myself : and got the languages, by hunting after the stories in the several poets I read; rather than read the books to get the languages. I followed everywhere as my fancy led me, and was like a boy gathering flowers in the fields and woods, just as they fall in his way. These five or six years I still look upon as the happiest part of my life.' (Spence's (Anecdotes,) by Singer, 1820, p. 193).
To this self-education his biographers have, with reason, attributed some of the peculiarities of his character and genius. His unremitting application no doubt injured his health and tended to make his life the "long disease' he afterward called it. Its enforced seclusion, coupled with the disabilities to which Papists were then exposed, fostered some of that—to give it its mildest name — disingenuousness, which came to be one of his worst faults. On the other hand, his natural parts were so keen, and his critical faculty so early matured, that it may be doubted whether any more liberal training would have better equipped him for what he afterward achieved. He is an excellent
illustration of Boswell's dictum about the su perior flavor of animals who (feed excursively' as contrasted with those who are "cooped up.' One result of his course of study was that he began early to versify, or, as he puts it, "lisp in numbers.* His first dtatnatic essay has already been referred to, and he is said to have com posed another on the Legend of Saint Genevieve. A third effort was an epic on Alcander, Prince of Rhodes, being four books of 1,000 lines each on the Dryden pattern, which opened under water in the Archipelago with a description of the Court of Neptune. By his own account this must have been a medley of many notes. "There was Milton's style in one part, and Cowley's in another; here the style of Spenser imitated, and there of Statius; here Homer and Vir2'77gil, an there Ovid he aft and Claudian" rd b (lb. pp. 24, , 9). but detached couplets found their way into later works. He also translated part of Ovid's (Metamorphoses ) of Statius, and Cicero de Senectute. His chief adviser was his father, who criticised his "rhymes,* and ruthlessly "sent him down' when he did not think them good enough. The Alcander epic occupied him from 13 to 15 (Ib. p. 279) when he went to London I to learn French and Italian. His education was completed by much study of Temple and Locke, of Rapin and Bossu, and of Dryden's "Pref aces." Already, while living at Binfield, he had made friends who served to influence his tastes. One was the old scholar and diplomatist, Sir William Trumbull of Easthampstead Park, who advised him to translate Homer; another, the wit and man of fashion, Henry Cromwell; a third, the veteran dramatist Wycherley, who was foolish enough to submit his senile poetical effusions to the criticisms of his sharp-eyed junior, a circumstance which has generally been held to have brought about a cooling of their friendship, although the manipulation of Pope's correspondence has not made it an easy matter to understand the actual attitude of affairs (Courthope's Life, pp. 73, 387-407). By Wych erley Pope was introduced to William Walsh of Abberley, in Worcestershire, the critic and minor poet, who enjoined his young friend to make correctness his "study and aim" (Spence, p. 280), in other words, "to study not only accuracy of expression' but also "propriety of design and justice of thought and taste" (Court hope's Life, p. 25). It has been shrewdly sug gested that in all probability Pope's native bias to these things suggested the judicious coun sels of the critic whom Pope afterward styles "knowing Walsh." Other literary luminaries with whom he became acquainted at this period were Garth of The Dispensary,' Congreve, and Lord Lansdowne.