him without alteration not only in the Essay on Criticism, but in the Dunciad. Alcander, after having progressed to the number of 4000 lines, and though uniting in itself specimens of every style admired by its author-Milton and Cowley and Spenser, Homer and Virgil, Ovid and Claudian and Statius-was left uncompleted and ultimately perished in the flames, to which this juvenile magnum opus seems to have been sentenced by the author himself, and not, as has been stated, by Bishop Atterbury1. In his fifteenth year Pope went to London to learn French and Italian; but there is no evidence, either in his letters or in his works, that he ever attained to any real familiarity with either of these languages. French he seems to have learnt to read with ease; whether he conversed in it may be doubted, and his invariable habit in his poetry of accentuating French words according to the English rule would seem to lead to a contrary conclusion. As to Italian, he is said to have preferred Ariosto to Tasso; but translations existed of both; and the circumstance that in his Essay on Criticism he unjustifiably singles out Vida for an unmerited eminence among the Italian writers of the renaissance proves less than nothing as to Pope's knowledge either of that language or its literature; inasmuch as the work of Vida to which special allusions are made in the Essay was written in Latin. After a few months in London we find him once more returned to the retirement of Binfield; and hereupon ensues a period of five or six years' close application to study. As with Pope everything was precocious, so during this early period of his life he is overtaken by that phase of despondency and seemingly uncontrollable melancholy which work engenders in those of sedentary, as it cures in those of active habits of life, but which has tried few at so premature a point of their careers. In Pope's case the friendly advice of a priest named Southcote prescribed the obvious remedy, moderation in study combined with regular bodily exercise, and it is touching to find the poet in the days of his prosperity mindful of the inestimable service rendered him by the good father, and obtaining for the latter, at the hands of the obnoxious Walpole, a comfortable abbacy in France. It was not till a much later period of his life, that under the influence of minds foreign in their constitution to his own, Pope's studies ever seriously deviated from the narrow course which they had taken in his boyhood. Ancient and English poets nearly monopolised his attention; translation and imitation helping him to familiarise himself by practice with the styles of his favourite authors. He translated that part of Statius which he subsequently published with the corrections of his friend and adviser Walsh; as well as Cicero's De Senectute, an isolated juvenile effort in prose which chance has continued to hide from the eyes of posterity. Among English writers he was attracted in a far higher degree by the poets than by the prosaists. Yet he read Locke's Essay, though not without effort; and Sir William Temple's Varia, though without sympathy. His own prose style can hardly be said to have 1 See Roscoe's Life, pp. 19-20. suffered from his study of the latter author; and from his earlier letters, as well as from his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry, it is manifest that as a prose-writer he only lost the art of writing naturally by slow degrees. Of his appreciation of the distinctive styles of several English poets his Imitations offer sufficient proofs; that the genius of Chaucer only in part, and that of Spenser hardly at all, revealed itself to him, seems equally clear, if equally natural. His brief apprenticeship was already drawing towards its close; and he became an author before he had found time or opportunity to exchange dilettantism for scholarship. II. A kindly remembrance will ever be due to the friendly circle whose encouragement first launched Pope upon his literary life. Yet it required no extraordinary penetration to recognise in the gifted and studious boy the promise of brilliant original workmanship, even when he was most intent upon reproducing in juvenile clay of his own such monuments of past masters as had attracted his attention. Pope's parental home was far enough removed from the busy city to enable him to become one of the wonders of his vicinity; and at East Hamstead near Binfield dwelt an old gentleman well qualified by shrewdness and experience to become the earliest patron of youthful merit. The retirement of diplomatists has frequently been of service to literature; and Sir William Trumball, as his letters prove, well merited the encomium which Pope bestowed upon him in his Epitaph, that he was at once 'fill'd with the sense of age' and 'the fire of youth.' 'Give me leave to tell you,' he wrote to Pope as early as 1705, 'that I know nobody so likely to equal' Milton as the author of his earlier poems 'even at the age he wrote most of them, as yourself.' It was Trumball who introduced his protégé to Wycherley, the veteran of many a literary campaign. 'Manly' Wycherley, though he could look back upon a series of comedies unsurpassed in brutal vigour, was now in his old age collecting and revising the more innocent, if less powerful, efforts of his lyric moments. To Pope, however, he could at first hardly fail to be a literary hero, until at a rather later period familiarity with the old man's poems (submitted by him for the correction of the tiro) bred its inevitable consequence, and a too literal interpretation on Pope's part of a proverbially delicate request caused a coolness which prevented a continuance of friendly intercourse on the old terms. To Trumball in the first instance, and then to Wycherley, Pope had communicated a copy of his first completed effort, the Pastorals. Wycherley in his turn sent them to Walsh, who was himself not unknown as a poet, but enjoyed a still higher reputation as a critic. He received the juvenile poems favourably and returned a gratifying verdict upon them: 'It is not flattery at all to say that Vergil had written nothing so good at his age1.' He then extended Referring of course to the 'juvenile poems' The first of his Eclogues were certainly written at of Vergil now universally regarded as spurious. a later age than the Pastorals of Pope. his personal patronage to the young aspirant after poetic fame, and invited him to his seat of Abberley in Worcestershire. Walsh died in 1708, a year before the Pastorals were actually published; but he lived to point out to his young friend the path from which the latter never swerved during his literary career; he bade him be a 'correct poet,' or in other words, desired to limit the excursions of Pope's muse to regions already meted out by trustworthy predecessors, 'prescribed her heights and pruned her tender wing1.' 'The best of the modern poets in all languages,' wrote Walsh to Pope in 1706, 'are those that have the nearest copied the ancients,' a maxim sufficiently characteristic of his critical standpoints. Another friend with whom Pope at this time became intimate and to whom he addressed many letters (published surreptitiously in 1727 by the mistress of his correspondent) was Henry Cromwell. Of the latter personally little is known; except that he was slovenly in his person and ‘rode a hunting in a tye-wig2;' but his letters to Pope show him to have been an amateur critic as well as student, and he seems to have largely contributed to introduce Pope and his writings to the knowledge of society in town, where Cromwell was a resident. And thus among these patrons and friends the Pastorals during four years or thereabouts passed from hand to hand, and were again shown to other personages prominent in society or letters:-to George Granville afterwards Lord Lansdowne, a poet and patron of poets, modest on the head of his own performances, eager for the success of those of others;-to Lord Halifax who afterwards when first lord of the Treasury was to honour himself by offering a pension to Pope which the latter, equally to his honour, declined;-to Lord Somers, a venerated chief of the same party, the Whigs;—and among the acknowledged leaders of literature to the popular Garth, and to Congreve the all-admired, the inimitable, who could afford to beam benignantly upon rising talent, though avowing himself careless of his own literary fame. Fortified by the approval of such patrons as these, the young poet could have no difficulty in finding an opportunity for ushering into the world his poetic offspring. Its sponsors had been secured beforehand; and the necessary midwife appeared in the person of the famous bookseller Jacob Tonson3, who expressed his desire to include Pope's Pastorals in the forthcoming volume of his Poetic Miscellany. Tonson and his brother-publisher Lintot were the Bacon and Bungay of our Augustan age; enterprising men whose rivalry was of high significance to the literary men of their times. If the one produced a poetic miscellany, the other was sure to outbid it by a miscellany to match; if the one rode down to Oxford to gather in the slowly-ripening fruits of academic leisure, his rival might be safely sought on the way to Cambridge; and thus to those authors whose name was not known enough to ensure a subscription-list, to poets critics and translators they were the best of friends. They kept their hands free from the lawless audacity of their contemporary Curll; and though the confraternity of authors was too small and weak to enable them to hold their own in a bargain, it cannot be doubted that the enterprise of these publishers helped to transfer much of the public attention from the stage to the bookseller's counter. Lintot soon afterwards became Pope's usual publisher; but the mysterious vagaries in which he loved to indulge in bringing out his works frequently led him to avail himself of other and inferior channels. In 1709, then, Pope's Pastorals saw the light of publicity; and as the same volume of Miscellanies (which included a few other of Pope's early pieces) commenced with the Pastorals of Ambrose Phillips (afterwards mercilessly burlesqued by Gay) the young poet found himself on his first appearance before the world unintentionally furnished with that invaluable aid towards a literary success—a foil. III. Between the years 1709 and 1715 falls the most varied and active period of Pope's personal life and literary career. It extends from the publication of the Pastorals to that of the first volume of his Iliad. As it was the latter work which established him as a Classic in the eyes of his contemporaries, and the proceeds of which furnished him with the means of leading a life congenial to his disposition and suitable to his temperament and health, so its publication marks the conclusion of his brief period of journeymanship in the world of literature. It was during this period too that after a few oscillations he finally determined the circle of his intimacy, and secured for himself the lasting enmity of some amongst his most persevering opponents. The literary world which Pope entered as the author of poems full of promise, but betraying no special mark such as to range him at once among the adherents of any particular school or coterie, was, as has been already sufficiently indicated, divided into two camps. Parnassus was split from summit to base; and it was upon the Tory half that the sun of Royal and government favour had just begun to shine with concentrated warmth. The Tory wits were accordingly with hardly an exception politicians above all; while the Whig writers ranged with greater freedom through more various walks of literature. Whig patronage has perhaps at other times been distributed among literary men with a less immediate expectation of a quid pro quo than that of their opponents. At all events, Pope's early patrons had been chiefly connected with the former party; and, averse by nature from busying himself with political questions1, he was more likely to be drawn into the wider Whenever as a boy, in reading Sir Wm. Temple's writings, he found anything political in them he had no manner of feeling for it. (Spence, quoted by Roscoe.) In 1714 he writes to Edward Blount that he is, 'thank God, below all the accidents of state-changes by his circumstances, and above them by his philosophy.' And to this indifference he adhered so consistently through circle of which Addison was the centre than among the fiery band where Swift loved to lord it over peers and prelates. Pope was both young enough and sympathetic enough to seek and find friends on either side; but it was with the Whig writers that during his visits to town in 1710 and the following year he appears to have principally associated. When in 1711 he published his Essay on Criticism, it was at once commended by Addison in the Spectator to the favour of a discerning public; Steele brimmed over with eager requests for contributions to the same paper from so accomplished a hand, and, about the commencement of the year 1712, appears to have introduced the young author to Addison himself. Unhappily it was not long before a relation thus auspiciously commenced was to be enveloped in a network of petty clouds, until it ended in the most pitiable, though far from the most violent, of Pope's literary quarrels. The quarrel—if a series of unreturned attacks can be called a quarrel-did not actually explode till the time of the publication of the Iliad. Yet its origin dates almost from the commencement of Pope's acquaintance with Addison, and connects itself with that Essay on Criticism by which Pope took rank among the most brilliant writers of his age. In his friendly notice of that poem Addison had taken exception to the attacks which it contains upon Blackmore and Dennis; but the praise bestowed upon the entire work had been too cordial to allow this exception to rankle in Pope's mind. In 1712 appeared in a volume of miscellanies published by Lintot the first edition of the young poet's fresh and sparkling Rape of the Lock. Addison's notice of this poem in the Spectator had been favourable, but not enthusiastic; while his own avowed followers Tickell and Ambrose Phillips had, as contributors to the same Miscellany, received a measure of eulogy which Pope might justly regard as excessive. When he informed Addison of his design to enlarge the Rape of the Lock by introducing the machinery of the Sylphs, Addison pronounced against the proposed addition. According to Warburton, Pope discerned (and as Warburton implies, truly discerned) in this advice the insidious intention of preventing an improvement sure of success. There is no reason for accepting Warburton's insinuation at more than its worth; and at best, therefore, this interpretation on the part of Pope of a very natural and plausible counsel must be viewed as an afterthought. For in April 1713 we find Pope furnishing Addison's tragedy of Cato with a prologue, which was duly printed with an encomium by Steele in Addison's new paper, the Guardian, to which Pope was himself an occasional contributor1. Dennis in his character of devil's advocate made a furious, though not wholly inept, onslaught upon the popular tragedy; and Pope took upon himself to stand forth as its defender. out life that Ruffhead (Life of Pope, p. 45) declares himself warranted by the best authorities in stating that Pope never wrote a single political paper. In his writings he can hardly be said to have ever manifested any political opinions genu inely his own; he took his party preferences and ૮. |