"Why did I write? What sin to me unknown I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. I left no calling for this idle trade, No duty broke, no father disobey'd: The muse but served to case some friend, not wife, To help me through this long disease, my life." At this tender age he wrote a tragedy, which he persuaded his schoolmates to act, and an Ode on Solitude. His time From thirteen to fifteen, he composed an epic of four thousand verses. was now wholly spent in reading and writing. He studied books of poetry and criticism, English, French, Greek, and Latin authors, with such assiduity that he nearly died. Of all English poets, his favorite was Dryden, whom he held in such veneration that he persuaded some friends to take him to a coffee-house which Dryden frequented, to delight himself with a glimpse of his model and master. Who can bound the possibilities of one that so early feels the power of harmony and the zeal of genius, and who does not regret that the master died before he learned the value of the homage paid him by his admiring pupil? His life as an author is computed from the age of sixteen. For choice words and exquisite arrangement, his poetry already surpassed Dryden's. At seventeen he was asked to correct the poems of a reputable author of sixty-nine, and corrected them so well that the author was mortified and offended. Wits, courtiers, statesmen, and the brilliant of fashion caressed and honored him. His known devotion to letters and his promise of future excellence had from earliest boyhood won the flattering attentions of the most accomplished men of the world. In 1715, he persuaded his parents to remove to Chiswick, where two years later his father died suddenly, in the seventy-fifth year of his age. The poet, with his now aged mother, shortly removed. to Twickenham, a spot to which his residence afterwards procured such classic celebrity. His grounds (five acres in all) he tastefully embellished with those designs of vine, shrub, and tree, which his verses mention. For convenient admission to a garden across the highway, he cut a subterraneous passage, adorned it with fossil forms, and called it a grotto, into whose silence and retreat care and passion might not enter. 'Vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage.' Here, in poetic ease, he continued to live in the smiles of fortune and to bask in the favors of the great. His domestic relations were always the happiest one placid scene of parental obedience and of gentle filial authority. In spirit and inclination, his parents, we imagine, would have subscribed themselves, 'Yours dutifully.' However petulant and acrimonious his disposition as displayed to others, to them he never intermitted the piety of a respectful tenderness. Aware that his mother lived upon his presence or by his image, he, long denied himself all excursions that could not be accomplished within a week; and to the same cause must be ascribed the fact that he never went abroad,—not to Italy, not to Ireland, not even to France. His life was always one of leisure, and, but for his strange mixture of discordant parts, must have been like a dream of pleasure,— a condition more conducive to effeminacy than to strength, more favorable to elegance of thought than to grandeur. 'A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.' Pope's increasing pride and irritability, his supercilious contempt of struggling authors, raised around him a swarm of enemies animated by envy or revenge. His later years were agitated by the asperities of personal dispute and the loss of genial companionships. In 1732, he was deprived of Atterbury and Gay, two of his dearest friends. From Addison he had been estranged. Swift, sunk in idiocy, he had virtually lost forever. In 1733 occurred the death of his mother, then ninety-three years old. She had for some time been in her dotage, unable to recognize any face but that of her son. Three days after, writing to a painter, with the view of having her portrait taken before the coffin was closed, he says: 'I thank God her death was as easy as her life was innocent; and as it cost her not a groan nor even a sigh, there is yet upon her countenance such an expression of tranquillity that it would afford the finest image of a saint expired that ever painting drew. Adieu, may you die as happily.' It is a pleasing reflection that the parents who idolized him, who had fondly watched his spark of genius fanned into flame, lived to see him the idol of the nation. He now complains bitterly that, if he would, have friends in the future, he must seek them amongst strangers and another generation. Henceforward he was chiefly engaged in satires,- his satire doubtless rendered more intense by his sense of desolation,—and was entangled in feuds of various complexions with people of various pretensions. In 1742 he became sensible that his vital powers were rapidly declining. His complaint was a dropsy of the chest, and he knew it to be incurable. With a behavior admirably philosophical, he discontinued original composition, and employed himself in revising and burnishing those former works on which he must rely for his reputation with future ages. A few days before his death, he was delirious, and afterwards mentioned the fact as a sufficient humiliation of human vanity. In his closing hours he complained of inability to think; saw things as through a curtain, in false colors, and inquired at one time what arm it was that came out from the wall. He dined in company two days before he died; and a few mornings before, during a fit of delirium, he was found very early in his library, writing on the immortality of the soul. Asked whether a priest should not be called, he answered, ‘I do not think it essential, but it will be very right and I thank you for putting me in mind of it.' In the morning, after the last sacraments had been given, he said, 'There is nothing that is meritorious but virtue and friendship; and indeed friendship itself is only a part of virtue.' He died on a summer's evening, in the month of flowers, in 1744; so quietly that the attendants could not distinguish the exact moment of his dissolution. Appearance.-A dwarf, four feet high, hunch-backed, thin, and sickly; so crooked that he was called the 'Interrogation Point'; so weak that he had constantly to wear stays, scarcely able to hold himself erect till they were laced; so sensitive to cold that he had to be wrapped in flannels, furs, and liņen, and had his feet encased in three pairs of stockings; so little that he required a high chair at the table; so bald, after the middle of life, that, when he had no company, he dined in a velvet cap. He could neither dress nor undress without help. His vital functions were so much disordered that his life was 'a long disease.' He had a large, fine eye, and a long, handsome nose. His voice, when a child, was so sweet that he was fondly styled 'The little Nightingale.' He was fastidious in his dress, and elegant in his manWe are willing to believe that his bodily defects were advantageous to him as a writer. 'Whosoever,' says Bacon, ners. 'hath anything fixed in his person that doth induce contempt, hath also a perpetual spur in himself to rescue and deliver himself from scorn.' Peculiarities. We are prepared to find him whimsical, fretful, punctilious, and exacting. Persons and occasions were expected to be indulgent of his humor. When he wanted to sleep, he nodded in company; and once dozed while the Prince of Wales was discoursing of poetry. Often invited, he was a troublesome guest. The attentions of the whole family were needed to supply his numerous wants. His errands were so many and frivolous that the footmen were soon disposed to avoid him, and Lord Oxford had to discharge several for their resolute refusal of his messages. The maids were wont to justify a neglect of duty by the plea that they had been attending to the demands of Mr. Pope. He loved highly seasoned dishes, and would eat till his stomach was oppressed. Often, without a word, capriciously, unaccountably, he would quit the house of the Earl of Oxford, and must be courted back. He was sometimes sportive with servants or inferiors, but was himself never known to laugh. Method. By his own account, from fourteen to twenty he read for amusement, from twenty to twenty-seven for improvement and instruction: in the first period, desiring only to know; in the second, endeavoring to judge. In his multifarious reading, he was diligently selective; appropriated all poetic ornaments, graceful contrasts, noble images, and stored them away in his memory as his literary wardrobe; combined and classified into a mental dictionary, so as to be ready at his call, the materials which might serve to round his periods or illuminate his ideas. What he heard, he was attentive to retain. If conversation offered anything, he committed it to paper. If a thought or word, happier than usual, occurred to him, he wrote it down. He required his writing-box to be placed upon his bed before he rose. Lord Oxford's domestic is said to have been called from her bed four times, of a winter's night, to supply him with paper lest he should lose a thought. Having written, he examined and polished long; amplifying, adorning, and refining. When he had completed a manuscript his first thoughts in his first words- he kept it two years under his inspection; invited the criticism of his friends, took counsel of his enemies; retouched, line by line, with a diligence that never wearied; sometimes recast till the original could not be recognized in the final revision. The only pieces which he wrote with an appearance of haste, were written, almost every line, twice over. 'I gave him a clean transcript,' says the publisher, 'which he sent some time afterwards to me for the press, with almost every line written twice over a second time.' A work, when once it had passed the press, continued to receive improvements in new editions. We need not inquire what will be the distinctive character of the product. Method, leisure, independence of fortune, freedom from turmoil, consecration that makes poetry the lodestar of life, - this is the school of training for brilliant and perfect art. Writings. — Essay on Criticism (1711); a judicious selection of precepts from Horace, Shakespeare, and other critics of the poetic art. Composed two years before publication, when Pope was only twenty-one. The first poem that fixed his reputation, and commonly regarded as one of his greatest, though one of his earliest, efforts. In arrangement, novel; in illustration, happy; in principle, just; in expression, terse and vigorous; in thought, for so young a man, marvellous; in harmony, uniform; in rhyme, defective. One of the most remarkable of its particular beauties is the comparison of a student's progress in science with the journey of a traveller in the Alps,—a simile that at once aids the understanding and elevates the fancy. Rape of the Lock (1712); the finest, most brilliant, mockheroic poem in the world. Lord Petre cut a lock of hair from the head of a fashionable beauty. A quarrel ensues. To laugh the estranged lovers together again, Pope writes an epic in gauze and silver spangles. Invocations, apostrophes, councils, fatal catastrophes, fearful combats between beaux and belles, spirits of the air—sylphs, gnomes, nymphs, and salamanders, form the poetic mechanism and action. The loftiness of style contrasts with the frivolous nature of the events. The history of a trifle is given with the pomp of heraldry, and the meanest things are set off with stately phrase and profuse ornament. A game at cards is a mimic Waterloo, whose hosts are marshalled by the king and queen of hearts: |