only Roman Catholic school that survived the Reformation. The master in Pope's day was a Mr. Taverner, who subsequently became chaplain at Warkworth Castle, near Banbury, where he died in 1745.

When Pope was twelve years old, his father left London and went to live at Binfield in Windsor Forest. There the boy was placed under the care of yet another priest, and, to use his own words, This was all the teaching I ever had, and, God knows, it extended a very little way.' 'When I had done with my priests,' he said to Spence, 'I took to reading by myself, for which I had a very great eagerness and enthusiasm, especially for poetry. . . . I continued in this close pursuit of pleasure and languages till nineteen or twenty. ... I went through all the best critics; almost all the English, French, and Latin poets of any name; the minor poets, Homer, and some of the greater Greek poets, in the original; and Tasso and Ariosto in translations. I even then liked Tasso better than Ariosto, as I do still; and Statius of all the Latin poets by much next to Virgil.'

We have referred thus fully to the subject of Pope's education, as it is of especial interest in connexion with the poem with which we have to do. The Rape of the Lock has been well called a mosaic of quotations, parodies, and allusions, derived from the masters of epic and narrative poetry' Fully to appreciate these allusions would require a wider and more familiar knowledge of classical literature than most of us possess nowadays. Not but what our knowledge of the classics is deeper and more accurate than was that of our forefathers; but that knowledge is not nearly so widely distributed either amongst the classics or amongst

1

1 Ryland, The Rape of the Lock, Introduction, p. liv.

C

ourselves as it was then. The education of the eighteenthcentury gentleman was founded almost exclusively on the classics; and rhythm, thoughts, words, forms of phrase, and allusions had a meaning for him which may well be missed by the reader of average culture to-day. Homer, and Virgil, and Horace we know more or less, but who reads Statius now? The charm which The Rape of the Lock has for us is therefore different from that which it possessed for contemporary readers. We are more attracted by the vivid picture of fashionable life two hundred years ago.

Even as regards the mere language of the poem, our attention is engaged in a different manner. It is not the echoes of Homer and Virgil which attract us so much as the flavour of anticlimax, unexpected trope, and epigram. It would be almost true to say that in this Heroi-comical' poem it is the comical part which makes most appeal to us, as the heroic part did to our ancestors. This is, however, a mere matter of detail after all; and, as Mr. Courthope puts it, 'the pleasure with which the poem is read in the reign of Queen Victoria is the same in kind as that with which it was read in the reign of Queen Anne.' It is, to say the least, noteworthy that a poem so abounding in classical allusion should have been the work of a lad like Pope, almost entirely self-educated, and to whom the ordinary advantages of his time were, as we have seen, in large measure denied.

It was at Binfield that the boy's health first began to suffer from his too assiduous study. He had an attack of melancholia which led him to imagine that he was about to die, and he wrote farewell letters to several of his acquaintance, one of whom, the Abbé Southcote, consulted Dr. John Radcliffe, the most famous doctor of the day, about his young friend's

health. Radcliffe prescribed rest, a changed diet, and a daily ride through Windsor Forest, and so succeeded for a time in restoring his health and spirits. This perpetual study, however, says his cousin, Mr. Mannick, was the cause of his subsequent ill health; it changed his form, and ruined his constitution'. Thackeray gives us a touching picture: 'his body was crooked: he was so short that it was necessary to raise his chair in order to place him on a level with other people at table. He was sewed up in a buckram suit every morning, and required a nurse like a child'; and he alludes in a note to his being fed on ass's milk, and to his (Pope's) own lines about his friend Dr. Arbuthnot having helped him through that long disease, my life'.

It was during the Binfield days, too, that Pope made many of his friends. His first poet-friend was probably Wycherley, the dramatist, who would send him his verses to correct. Another was the minor poet, William Walsh, with whom he spent much of the summer of 1705 at his home in Worcestershire. Another constant companion was Sir William Trumbull, of Easthampstead Park, a retired diplomatist, who had been a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and' who ', says Pope, 'loved very much to read and talk of the Classics in his retirement. We used to take a ride out together three or four days in the week, and at last almost every day.' Of Walsh, Pope said, in later life, 'He used to encourage 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 one great poet that was correct, and he desired me to make that my study and aim.' Mr. Courthope points out that by correctness' Walsh meant not only accuracy of expression, but also propriety of design and justice of thought and taste.

Pope's first published poems were the Pastorals, the Imitation of Ovid's 'Sappho Phaoni', and that of Chaucer's Merchant's Tale January and May), all of which appeared, together with poems by Rowe, Swift, Wycherley, Ambrose Philips, and others, in a volume of Poetical Miscellanies, published by Jacob Tonson in 1709. Philips's contribution to this volume was also 'Pastorals'; as to this, see the note to Canto iii. 19, 20. Mr. Courthope says that it may be safely assumed that the idea of Pope's Pastorals was the fruit of' his friendship and intercourse with Sir William Trumbull. Pope himself said that the Pastorals had been written as early as 1704; they had been shown to many of his friends besides Sir William Trumbull, to whom the first was dedicated, such as Henry Cromwell, Lord Halifax, Wycherley, Congreve, Garth, and others. Sir George Granville, afterwards Lord Lansdowne, wrote of a young poet whom he [Wycherley] and Walsh have taken under their wing. His name is Pope... If he goes on as he has begun in the Pastoral way... we may hope to see English poetry vie with the Roman.' Tonson himself had seen one of these Pastorals in 1706, and had asked to be allowed to publish it.

About the same time, according to Pope's own account, he wrote the first 290 lines of his Windsor Forest, but the latter portion was not written till 1710, and the poem itself was not published till 1713. His next publication was the Essay on Criticism, which was written either in 1707 or 1709 (it is not clear which), and was published in May, 1711. This was noticed favourably in The Spectator for December 20 in the same year, and Pope wrote a grateful letter of acknowledgement to Steele, whom he assumed to have been the writer of the article. Steele replied that the paper was not written by him, but by one with whom I will make you

acquainted, which is the best return I can make to you'. This was the beginning of Pope's acquaintance with Addison, who published Pope's poem The Messiah in The Spectator for the 14th of the following May. In the same month appeared the first version of The Rape of the Lock, which—as we have seen-was written in the previous July. Pope was then twenty-three years old, and had already made his mark as a poet.

2. His friend and correspondent, John Caryll, was, in 1711, double Pope's age, having been born in or about 1666. The son of Mr. Richard Caryll of West Grinstead in Sussex, he had succeeded to his father's property there on the latter's death in 1701. But he had also property (Lady Holt) of his own at West Harting in the same county. This had come to him as the grantee of the forfeited estates of his uncle (also John Caryll), who had been secretary to James II's Queen Mary; he had followed her into France, and had been made 'Baron Caryll of Dunford' by the Old Pretender at the Court of St. Germains. Macaulay was confusing him with his nephew when he wrote, ' Half a line in The Rape of the Lock has made his name immortal.' He never returned to England, and died in Paris at the age of eighty-six on September 4, 1711, before The Rape of the Lock was published. He had left England in the year in which Pope was born, so that he could not have been the inspirer of the poem. No doubt Pope was well acquainted with many members of the Caryll family, as is evidenced by a couplet in Gay's poem Pope's Welcome from Greece

I see the friendly Carylls come by dozens,

Their wives, their uncles, daughters, sons, and cousins. But it cannot be doubted that his especial friend and the