justify this description; the character of the letters is fine, clear, and scholarly.

His first regular instructor was Bannister, a Roman Catholic priest, who, after the manner of the Jesuits, taught him Latin and Greek at the same time. This was when he was eight years of age. In the following year he was sent to a Roman Catholic seminary at Twyford, near Winchester.' Here, according to his own account, he unlearnt whatever he had gained from his first tutor, and was in a little time removed by his parents, in consequence of a severe whipping from his master, on whom he had written a satire.' He was next placed under the charge of one Thomas Deane, who kept a school, first at Marylebone and afterwards at Hyde Park Corner. Deane had been a Fellow of University College, Oxford, and is described by Anthony Wood as "the creature and convert" of the notorious Obadiah Walker, Master of that College in the time of James II. After the Revolution he was declared 'non-socius,' and he appears to have been zealous in defence of his principles, for Wood says that in 1691 he stood in the pillory under the name of Thomas Franks. It may be supposed that his sufferings enlisted the sympathies of the Roman Catholics, who, in spite of his glaring incapacity as a schoolmaster, helped him to support himself by teaching. Pope says that all he learned under him was "to construe a little of Tully's Offices." His scholars were left to follow their own devices, and Pope took advantage of his leisure to compose here his first and last

1 Mr. Carruthers rather needlessly supposes that Twyford in Berkshire may have been the place where Pope was at school. Pope himself told Spence that it was Twyford near Winchester (Spence's 'Anecdotes,' p. 8). The Roman Catholic school in this place seems to have been discontinued about the beginning of the last century, and was succeeded by the well-known Protestant school

4

acted tragedy by stringing together a number of speeches out of Ogilby's Homer interspersed with verses made by himself. His schoolfellows were persuaded to perform this; the part of Ajax being played by Deane's gardener. Vain, meddlesome, and, as the poet describes him to Caryll, "all his life a dupe to some project or other," Deane, while he thus neglected his immediate duties, saw his school gradually decline; and in 1727, being once more in prison, he applied for relief to Pope, who, with his usual ready benevolence, took steps to keep him out of the way of harm and publication by providing him with a small pension. After leaving Deane's school he was taken by his father to the Forest and placed under a fourth priest, with whom he only remained a few months. This," he says, "was all the teaching I ever had, and, God knows, it extended a very little way." 2

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The circumstances of Pope's birth and education give him an exceptional place among the English poets, and must be taken into account in judging of his character and conduct in episodes which will hereafter be described. Νο English poet had yet been trained in a manner so independent of the life and institutions of his country. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Addison were all members of an English University: the three last had been educated in the great English public schools, in which they had acquired an early appreciation of the general principles of English society, and of the accepted standards of taste and language. Pope, on the other hand, lived all his early life in the solitude of Windsor Forest, the child of parents imperfectly educated and indulgent to his every whim, and under the religious guidance of those who, themselves proscribed and persecuted, regarded with perhaps not unnatural indulgence the use of equivocation as an instrument of self

See Letter to Caryll, March 28 [1727]. Deane died at Malden Nov. 10, 1735. It would seem probable that he subsisted for the latter years

of his life on Pope's pension. 'Athenæ Oxonienses,' vol. iv., p. 451.

2

Spence, 'Anecdotes,' p. 193,

defence.' The effect of this early isolation on his character was unquestionably pernicious. In the sole company of his books he acquired habits of self-consciousness that clung to him through life. He knew nothing of that manly conflict between equals which does so much to strengthen and correct the character of boys in an English public school. He thus entered upon his struggle with society with a boundless appetite for fame, but with his vanity and self-will fostered by the admiring fondness of all about him, and with an ignorance of the measure applied by public opinion to the tricks and plots for which he had by nature a strong propensity.

Intellectually, on the other hand, his secluded education was not without its advantages. He himself told Spence that he thought his want of a public-school training had been no loss to him, as he had been forced to read for the sense, whereas schoolboys generally were forced to read for the words-a judgment which he afterwards embodied in the last book of the 'Dunciad,' where he gives what pretends to be an accurate description of the methods of instruction practised in English schools:

"To ask, to guess, to know, as they commence,

As fancy opens the quick springs of sense;

We ply the memory, we load the brain,
Bind rebel wit and double chain on chain;

Confine the thought to exercise the breath,

And keep them in the pale of words till death." "

In this opinion there was more pique than sincerity, for no one can have known better than himself, after all his labours of translation, the value of verbal scholarship, and none would have been quicker to acknowledge it, if it had not been for his quarrels with Bentley and Theobald. But beyond scholarship, public school discipline would have added little to his mental resources. The course of learning it prescribes is, by general acknowledgment, well qualified to develop taste

1 See letter from Pope to Teresa Blount of Aug. 16, 1716.

2 'Dunciad,' Book IV., 155. Compare also Spence, 'Anecdotes,' p. 280.

and discernment, but Pope had from nature what others acquire by cultivation, a judgment preternaturally strong and penetrating, and an instinct of propriety hardly ever at fault. His mind, equipped with an exquisite sense of form and order, rather than fertile in original thought, required to be stimulated by the conceptions of others, so that the irregular course of self-education which he pursued served admirably to expand his genius.

"When," he said to Spence, "I had done with my priests, I took to reading by myself, for which I had a very great eagerness and enthusiasm, especially for poetry and in a few years I had dipped into a great number of the English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets. This I did without any design but that of pleasing myself, and got the languages by hunting after the stories in the several poets I read ; rather than read the books to get the languages. I followed everywhere as my fancy led me, and was like a boy gathering flowers in the field just as they fell in his way."1

Such desultory reading would have been almost impossible for him at a public school; it would certainly have been disapproved. Joseph Warton was a man of taste and refinement, but he was a typical schoolmaster, and his strictures on the Roman poets of the post-classical ages suggest the amount of indulgence which would have been shown at Winchester or Westminster to Pope's liking for Statius. "It were to be wished," he says, "that no youth of genius were even suffered to look into Statius, Lucan, Claudian, or Seneca, authors who, by their forced conceits, by their violent metaphors, by their swelling epithets, by their want of a just decorum, have a strong tendency to dazzle and mislead inexperienced minds and tastes unformed from the true relish of possibility, propriety, simplicity and nature." Sound enough in respect to the ordinary schoolboy, Warton's principle was inapplicable to Pope, who, far from succumbing to the brilliant extravagance of the second-class poets he read, was led to

1 Spence, Anecdotes,' p. 193.

2 Warton's edition of Pope's Works, vol. ii. p. 169.

compare them with the greater writers, and with each other, and from the comparison to construct that generalised code of taste, which afterwards so materially influenced his own methods of composition.

As regards action and incident, the years that he spent in the retirement of Windsor Forest are naturally uneventful; but in so far as they exhibit the growth of his mind, his boyish attempts at composition, the difficulties he experienced, his gradual progress through failure and experiment to a right understanding of classical principles in art, they are full of interest for the biographer. The history of this early poetical development, therefore, must form the subject of the two following chapters; and if I am unfortunate enough to tax the patience of the reader, by dwelling with some fulness on the critical questions that are involved, I would ask him to remember with indulgence that this is necessary in order to explain the full significance of the movement which Pope originated in English literature.