perspective, the multiplied walks, and bounded wilderness. But Milton's description of the garden of Eden shows how well the epic bard had imbibed in youth, and intensely appreciated, that true taste which makes art the handmaid of nature.

From his infancy Pope was considered a prodigy. He had inherited from his father a crooked body, and from his mother a sickly constitution, perpetually subject to severe headaches; and hence great care and tenderness were required in his nurture. His faithful nurse, Mary Beach, lived to see him a great man; and when she died in 1725, the poet erected a stone over her grave, at Twickenham, to tell that Alexander Pope, whom she nursed in infancy, and affectionately attended for twenty-eight years, was grateful for her services. He had nearly lost his life when a child, from a wild cow that threw him down, and with her horns wounded him in the throat. He charmed all the household by his gentleness and sensibility, and, in consequence of the sweetness of his voice, was called "the little nightingale.” This musical distinction seems to have continued, for Lord Orrery mentions that "honest Tom Southerne" the dramatist used, in advanced life, to apply to him the same musical appellation. He was taught his letters by an old aunt, and he taught himself to write by copying from printed books. This art he also retained through life, and often practised with singular neatness and proficiency. Johnson remarks that his ordinary hand was not elegant. But this opinion must have been formed from a hasty survey of the Homer MSS. in the British Museum, which are carelessly written and crowded with interlineations. His letters to Henry

Cromwell (the originals of which still exist), his letters to ladies, and his inscriptions in books presented to his friends, are specimens of fine, clear, and scholar-like penmanship.

inventor of modern gardening: "he leaped the sunk fence and saw that all nature was a garden." Pope both instructed and was instructed by Kent.

In his eighth year Pope was put under the tuition of the family priest, (whom Spence calls Banister, a name subscribed to some of the notes in the Dunciad), and the priest taught him the accidence and first parts of grammar, by adopting the method followed in the Jesuits' schools, of teaching the rudiments of Latin and Greek together. He then attended two little schools, at which he learned nothing. The first of these, according to Spence, was the Catholic seminary at Twyford, near Winchester; but it is more likely to have been at Twyford, on the river Loddon, near Binfield. At Twyford he wrote a lampoon on his master for some faults he had discovered in him, so early had he assumed the characters of critic and satirist! He was flogged for the offence, and his indulgent father, in resentment, took him away and placed him in a London school.12 This was kept by a Catholic convert named Deane, who had a school first at Marylebone, and afterwards at Hyde Park Corner, at both of which places Pope was under his charge. "I began writing verses of my own invention," he says, "farther back

12 Spence. But a correspondent of Curll's, " E. P.," gives the following authentic like statement from alleged personal knowledge :-" The last school he was put to before the twelfth year of his age was in Devonshirestreet, near Bloomsbury; there I also was, and the late Duke of Norfolk, at the same time. It was kept by one Bromley, a popish renegade, who had been a parson, and was one of King James's converts in Oxford. Some years after that prince's abdication he kept a little seminary, till, upon an advantageous offer made him, he went as travelling tutor to the present Lord Gage. Mr. Alexander Pope, before he had been four months at this school, or was able to construe Tully's Offices, employed his muse in satirising his master. It was a libel of at least one hundred verses, which a fellow-student having given information of, was found in his pocket, and the young satirist was soundly whipped, and kept a prisoner to his room for seven days; whereupon his father fetched him away; and I have been told he never went to school more." There was a William Bromley entered of Christ Church, Oxford, 1673. The Devonshire-street school may have been attended by Pope in a short intermediate period before he went to Deane's. For the latter we have the authority of Spence and Ayre.

I.]

[Page 17.

than I can well remember." Ogilby's translation of Homer was one of the first large poems he read, and, in after life, he spoke of the rapture it afforded him. "I was then about eight years old. This led me to Sandys's Ovid, which I liked extremely, and so I did a translation of part of Statius by some very bad hand. When I was about twelve I wrote a kind of play, which I got to be acted by my schoolfellows. It was a number of speeches from the Iliad tacked together with verses of my own." Ruff head says, the part of Ajax was performed by the master's gardener, who certainly would look the character, however the poetry might suffer, better than his juvenile associates. Mr. Deane was a careless, remiss teacher; and what with studying plays and making verses, and attending the theatre in company with the older boys, Pope made so little progress, that on leaving school he was only able, he says, to construe a little of Tully's Offices. He was better acquainted with Dryden than with Cicero, and his boyish admiration and curiosity led him to obtain a sight of the living poet. "I saw Mr. Dryden when I was about twelve years of age. [This must have been in the last year of Dryden's life.] I remember his face well, for I looked upon him even then with veneration, and observed him very particularly." He barely saw him, as he said to Wycherley-Virgilium tantum vidi; but he remembered that he was plump, of a fresh colour, with a down look, and was not very conversible.

To learning bred, he knew not what to say.

But in his highest mood of inspiration, sitting out the summer night in tremulous excitement, his grey locks waving in the early dawn, Dryden was a different sort of person. Dr. Johnson finely remarks, "who does not wish that Dryden could have known the value of the homage that was paid him, and foreseen the greatness of his young admirer ?" Yet, considering the perils and uncertainties of a literary life; its precarious rewards, feverish anxieties, mortifications and disappointments-joined to the tyranny