swims ashore, just as Ulysses does to the Island of Pheacia.-The same.

Mr. Pope thought himself the better in some respects for not having had a regular education. He (as he observed in particular) read originally for the sense, whereas we are taught for so many years to read only for words.-The same.

As I had a vast memory, and was sickly and so full of application, had I chanced to have been of the religion of the country I was born in, and been bred at the usual places of education, I should probably have written something on that subject, and against the methods now used there; and I believe I might have been more useful that way than any other. The same.

Bacon and Locke did not follow the common path, but beat out new ones; and you see what good they have done but much more is wanting. Aldridge did a great deal of good too in his way; there should be such people in the universities; but nothing can be done effectually till the government

takes it into their heads to encourage and animate such a reformation. The same.

About 15* I got acquainted with Mr. Walsh: he encouraged me much, and used to tell me that there was one way left of excelling; for though we had several great poets, we never had any one great poet that was correct, and he desired me to make that my study and aim.-The same. [This, I suppose, first led Mr. Pope to turn his lines over and over again so often, which he continued to the last, and did it with a surprising facility.]

I learned versification chiefly from Dryden's works, who has improved it much beyond any of our former poets, and would probably have brought it to its perfection, had not he been unhappily obliged to write so often in haste.-The same.

It was our family priest† who taught me figures, accidence, and first part of the grammar. If it had not been for that, I

should never have got any language; for I never learned any thing at the little schools I was at afterwards, and never should have followed any thing that I could not follow with pleasure.-The same.

I had learned very early to read, and delighted extremely in it; and taught myself to write very early too, by copying from printed books*; with which I used to divert myself, as other children do, with scrawling out pictures.-The same.

The Iliad took me up six years, and during that time, and particularly the first part of it, I was often under great pain and apprehensions. Though I conquered the

* When Mr. Pope got into the way of teaching himself, and applied so close to it in the Forest, some of his first exercises were imitations of the stories that pleased him most, in Ovid, or any other poet he was reading. I have one of these original exercises now by me, in his own hand. 'Tis the story of Acis and Galatea, from Ovid, and was translated when he was but fourteen years old. The title-page to this, from his manner of learning to write, is so like print, that it requires a good eye or a nice regard to distinguish it.

thoughts of it in the day, they would frighten me in the night. I dreamed often of being engaged in a long journey, and that I should never get to the end of it. This made so strong an impression upon me, that I sometimes dream of it still; of being engaged in that translation, of having got about half way through it, and being embarrassed, and under dread of never completing it.

If I had not undertaken that work, I should certainly have writ an epic; and I should have set down to it with this advantage-I had been nursed up in Homer and Virgil.-The same.

Mr. Pope has still a most excellent memory, and that both of the sensible and local kind. When I consulted him about the Hades of the ancients, he referred immediately to Pindar's second Olympic Ode, Plutarch's treatise de Iside et Oscride, the four places that relate to it in the Odyssey (though this was so many years after he had done that translation), Plato, Lucretius,

:

and some others, and turned to the very passages in most of them with a surprising readiness.

"Pray what is this asphodil of Homer?"" "Why, I believe, if one was to say the truth, 'twas nothing else but that poor yellow flower, that grows about our orchards; and if so, the verse might be thus translated in English :

the stern Achilles

Stalk'd through a mead of daffodillies."

The same.

Good part of the ballad on Lechmere and Guise was writ by Mr. Pope. The ballad the rabbit-woman, by him and Mr. Poultney; and they wrote two or three more together. The same.

Addison usually studied all the morning; then met his party at Button's; dined there, and stayed five or six hours, and sometimes far into the night.—The same.

I was of the company for about a year*, but found it too much for me: it hurt my health, and so I quitted it.-The same.

* Probably the year 1713. M.