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ILLUSTRATIONS TO VOL. I.

29. Portrait of Bishop Atterbury

30. Portrait of Broome

31. Portrait of Elijah Fenton......

32. Atterbury presenting his Bible to Pope, in the Tower

33. Dawley, the Seat of Lord Bolingbroke

34. Accident to Pope....

35. Portrait of Lord Chesterfield

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..to face 199

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36. Crowd of Authors besieging the Publishers to prevent the publication

of the Dunciad...

37. Portrait of Lord Hervey

38. Portrait of Dr. T. Warton..

39. Portrait of Arbuthnot..

40. Portrait of Lord Oxford..

41. Young dining with Pope

42. Pope on the Thames, at Twickenham..

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46. Pope, Bolingbroke, and Marchmont, in the Garden at Twickenham.. 294 47. Pope surrounded by his Friends, a short time before his Death, to face 295

48. Pope writing his Essay on the Immortality of the Soul

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52. Fac-simile of the only full-length Portrait of Pope

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LIFE OF POPE.

CHAPTER I.

HIS EARLY

POPE'S BIRTH, FAMILY, EDUCATION, AND STUDIES.
PATRONS AND FRIENDS. SIR WILLIAM TRUMBULL, WYCHERLEY,
WALSH, HENRY CROMWELL, THE BLOUNTS OF MAPLE-DURHAM.

THE death of Dryden on the 1st of May, 1700, left the poetical throne of England vacant, with no prospect of an immediate or adequate successor. His dominion had often been disputed, and was assailed to the last; but as every year strengthened his claims, and the latter portion of his life was the most rich and glorious of his literary career, his adversaries ultimately withdrew or became powerless, and his supremacy was firmly established. The magnificent funeral of the poet, though a gaudy and ill-conducted pageant, had a moral that penetrated through the folds of ceremony-it was a public recognition of merits which every effort of envy, faction, and caprice, had been employed to thwart and contemn. And posterity has amply ratified this acknowledgment of the services of the great national poet. Dryden inherited the faults and vices of his age, and he wanted the higher sensibilities, the purity of taste, and lofty moral feeling that dignify his art. But even when sinning with his contemporaries he soared far above them, and his English nature at length overcame his French tastes and the fashion of the Court. His sympathies had a wider and nobler range; his conceptions were clear

and masculine; and no one approached him in command of the stores of our language-whether choice and secret, or familiar and universal-or in that free, elastic, and sounding versification which has so large a compass of rhythmical melody. He gave to the heroic couplet the utmost variety of cadence, stateliness, and harmony of which that measure is susceptible; and his great Ode is still our finest specimen of lyric poetry. These native honours gained and tardily acknowledged, the venerable poet, when approaching the close of his chequered life, bequeathed to Congreve the care of his posthumous fame. He trusted that his friend would not suffer his remains to be insulted, nor those laurels shaded which would descend to himself. The sacred bequest was not neglected; but Dryden's laurels were destined to descend, not to the successful dramatist, but to one who should follow closely and reverently in his own footsteps, copying his subjects, his manner, and versification, and adding to them original powers of wit, fancy, and tenderness, and a brilliancy, condensation, and correctness, which even his master did not reach, and which still remain unsurpassed.

ALEXANDER POPE was born in London in the memorable year of the Revolution, 1688. The belief in judicial astrology was then not utterly exploded, and the professors of this pretended science living in Westminster—their ancient stronghold-used to exhibit a book of horoscopes of extraordinary men, among which was that of Pope. The planetary influences shown in the poet's horoscope proved, they said, that all the great events of his life, known or unknown to the world, were to happen in years of commotion and trouble His birth was in the year of that Revolution which drove the Stuarts into unregretted exile; his publication of Homer commenced in the year of the Jacobite insurrection of 1715; and he died in the year 1744, when an invasion from France was attempted; being the beginning of that struggle which terminated with the victory at Culloden.

DATE OF POPE'S BIRTH.

3

The old practising astrologers up to a late period boasted that Pope regularly consulted their predecessors. This tradition, however, may be discarded as an invention of the craft; for probably no distinguished poet, having "the vision and the faculty divine," was ever so free as Pope from all superstitious weakness or overpowering romance of sentiment.

There are few circumstances connected with the history or character of Pope that have not been made the subject of eager discussion; and we find the diversity of statement take its rise at the fountain-head. The date of his birth and the pedigree of his parents have been controverted. The former cannot be determined by an appeal to that record

-where to be born and die

Of rich and poor makes all the history.

The parish register at that time took no cognizance of the baptism of the children of Roman Catholic parents. A certain Richard Pope, scrivener, in St. Nicholas Lane, was law agent and afterwards churchwarden of the parishes of St. Edmund's and St. Nicholas from 1697 to 1702, but we have no notice of Alexander Pope. A contemporary account states that Pope was born in Cheapside on the 8th of June, 1688, "so that," it is added, "one week produced both Pope and the Pretender!" Ayre, in his memoir published the year after the poet's death, adopts this date, but silently drops Cheapside. The next authority purporting to be original, and one which possesses strong claims to attention, is a Life of Pope published by Mr. Owen Ruffhead in 1769. Owen Ruffhead was a plodding and prosaic lawyer, editor of the Statutes at Large; but he obtained information and manuscripts concerning Pope from Bishop Warburton, the poet's friend, commentator, and literary executor. Ruffhead states at Pope was born in Lombard Street on the 21st of May; Spence in his Anecdotes gives the same date and place; while Dr. Johnson-probably

from mere inattention-mentions the 22nd of May, and Warton follows Johnson. The question is still further perplexed by a passage in one of Pope's letters-a passage worth quoting for the fine lines it contains:

"Mr. Congreve's death touches me nearly. It was twenty years and more that I have known him every year carries away something dear with it, till we outlive all tendernesses, and become wretched individuals again as we begun. Adieu! This is my birthday, and this is my reflection upon it :

With added days if life give nothing new,

But like a sieve, let every pleasure through;
Some joy still lost, as each vain year runs o'er,
And all we gain, some sad reflection more!
Is this a birthday ?-Tis, alas! too clear
'Tis but the funeral of the former year.

No date is given to this letter, but Congreve died on the 19th of January, 1728-9;1 and as Pope and Gay were in familiar and constant intercourse, it has been inferred that Pope's birthday was near the time of Congreve's death, in the latter end of January or beginning of February. This discrepancy, however, is removed by a simple explanation. In preparing his letters for the press, Pope was in the habit of altering and revising them, and sometimes of making one printed epistle out of two or more written The lines we have quoted originally formed part of an address to Martha Blount; and there is little doubt that the latter part of the above extract was detached from some other letter, or had been added for the sake of the poetry and the sentiment. The combined testimony of Ruffhead and Spence is conclusive. The 21st of May, 1688, was

ones.

1 Two modes of reckoning the year, it will be remembered, existed up to 1753-the civil and ecclesiastical year, which commenced on the 25th of March, and the historical year, which began on the 1st of January. Hence the above mode of writing the date 1728-9, or 1728 the first representing the civil year, and the second the year according to our present computation. Pope always used the civil term, and errors have arisen from parties forgetting that according to his system January and February followed September and October in the same year.

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