educated by the family priest. He was afterwards sent to a Catholic seminary at Twyford, near Win A. Pope chester, where he lampooned his teacher, was severely punished, and afterwards taken home by his parents. He educated himself, and attended no school after his twelfth year! The whole of his early life was that of a severe student. He was a poet in his infancy. machinery of the poem, founded upon the Rosicrucian See! from the brake the whirring pheasant springs, So Zembla's rocks (the beauteous work of frost) As yet a child, and all unknown to fame, I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. The writings of Dryden became the more particular object of his admiration, and he prevailed upon a friend to introduce him to Will's coffeehouse, which Dryden then frequented, that he might have the gratification of seeing an author whom he so enthusiastically admired. Pope was then not more than twelve years of age. He wrote, but afterwards destroyed, various dramatic pieces, and at the age of sixteen composed his Pastorals, and his imitations of Chaucer. He soon became acquainted with most of the eminent persons of the day both in politics and literature. In 1711 appeared his Essay on Criticism, unquestionPope now commenced his translation of the Iliad. ably the finest piece of argumentative and reasoning At first the gigantic task oppressed him with its poetry in the English language. The work is said difficulty, but he grew more familiar with Homer's to have been composed two years before publication, images and expressions, and in a short time was when Pope was only twenty-one. The ripeness of able to despatch fifty verses a-day. Great part of judgment which it displays is truly marvellous. the manuscript was written upon the backs and Addison commended the Essay' warmly in the covers of letters, evincing that it was not withSpectator, and it instantly rose into great popu-out reason he was called paper-sparing Pope. The larity. The style of Pope was now formed and com- poet obtained a clear sum of £5320, 4s. by this plete. His versification was that of his master, translation: his exclamation— Dryden, but he gave the heroic couplet a peculiar terseness, correctness, and melody. The essay was shortly afterwards followed by the Rape of the Lock. The stealing of a lock of hair from a beauty of the day, Miss Arabella Fermor, by her lover, Lord Petre, was taken seriously, and caused an estrangement between the families, and Pope wrote his poem to make a jest of the affair, and laugh them together again. In this he did not succeed, but he added greatly to his reputation by the effort. The And thanks to Homer, since I live and thrive, was, however, scarcely just, if we consider that this to the ancient Greek, and his departure from the nice discrimination of character and speech which prevails in Homer, are faults now universally admitted. Cowper (though he failed himself in Homer) justly remarks, that the Iliad and Odyssey in Pope's hands have no more the air of antiquity than if he had himself invented them.' The success of the Iliad led to the translation of the Odyssey; but Pope called in his friends Broome and Fenton as assistants. These two coadjutors translated twelve books, and the notes were compiled by Broome. Fenton received £300, and Broome £500, while Pope had £2885, 5s. The Homeric labours occupied a period of twelve years-from 1713 to 1725. The improvement of his pecuniary resources enabled the poet to remove from the shades of Windsor Forest to a situation nearer the metropolis. He purchased a lease of a house and grounds at Twickenham, to Pope's Villa, Twickenham. which he removed with his father and mother, and where he continued to reside during the remainder of his life. This classic spot, which Pope delighted to improve, and where he was visited by ministers of state, wits, poets, and beauties, is now greatly defaced. Whilst on a visit to Oxford in 1716, Pope *Pope's house was not large, but sufficiently commodious for the wants of an English gentleman whose friends visited himself rather than his dwelling, and who were superior to the necessity of stately ceremonials. On one side it fronted to the road, which it closely adjoined; on the other, to a narrow lawn sloping to the Thames. A piece of pleasure-ground, including a garden, was cut off by the public road; an awkward and unpoetical arrangement, which the proprietor did his best to improve. After the poet's death, the villa was purchased by Sir William Stanhope, and subsequently by Lord Mendip, who carefully preserved everything connected with it; but, being in 1807 sold to the Baroness Howe, it was by that lady taken down, that a larger house might be built near its site. Now (1843), the place is the property of Young, Esq.; the second house has been enlarged into two, and further alterations are contemplated. The grounds have suffered a complete change since Pope's time, and a monument which he erected to his mother on a hillock at their further extremity has been removed. The only certain remnants of the poet's mansion are the vaults upon which it was built, three in number, the central one being connected with a tunnel, which, passing under the road, gives admission to the rear grounds, while the commenced, and probably finished, the most highly poetical and passionate of his works, the Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard. The delicacy of the poet in veiling over the circumstances of the story, and at the same time preserving the ardour of Eloisa's passion, the beauty of his imagery and descriptions, the exquisite melody of his versification, rising and falling like the tones of an Eolian harp, as he successively portrays the tumults of guilty love, the deepest penitence, and the highest devotional rapture, have never been surpassed. If less genial tastes and a love of satire withdrew Pope from those fountain-springs of the Muse, it was obviously from no want of power in the poet to display the richest hues of imagination, or the finest impulses of the human mind. The next literary undertaking of our author was an edition of Shakspeare, in which he attempted, with but indifferent success, to establish the text of the mighty poet, and explain his obscurities. In 1733, he published his Essay on Man, being part of a course of moral philosophy in verse which he projected. The Essay' is now read, not for its philosophy, but for its poetry. Its metaphysical distinctions are neglected for those splendid passages and striking incidents which irradiate the poem. In lines like the following, he speaks with a mingled sweetness and dignity superior to his great master Dryden : Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutored mind He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire; side ones are of the character of grottos, paved with square bricks, and stuck over with shells. It is curious to find over the central stone of the entrance into the left of these grottos, a large ammonite, and over the other, the piece of hardened clay in which its cast was left. Pope must have regarded these merely as curiosities, or lusus naturæ, little dreaming of the wonderful tale of the early condition of our globe which they assist in telling. A short narrow piazza in front of the grottos is probably the evening colonnade' of the lines on the absence of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The taste with which Pope laid out his grounds at Twickenham (five acres in all), had a marked effect on English landscape gardening. The Prince of Wales took the design of his garden from the poet's; and Kent, the improver and embellisher of pleasure grounds, received his best lessons from Pope. He aided materially in banishing the stiff formal Dutch style. Where grows?-where grows it not? If vain our toil, The anticipated approach of the Pretender led the We ought to blame the culture, not the soil. Fixed to no spot is Happiness sincere; 'Tis nowhere to be found, or everywhere; "Tis never to be bought, but always free, And fled from monarchs, ST JOHN! dwells with thee. Pope's future labours were chiefly confined to satire. In 1727 he published, in conjunction with his friend Swift, three volumes of Miscellanies, in prose and verse, which drew down upon the authors a torrent of invective. lampoons, and libels, and ultimately led to the Dunciad, by Pope. This elaborate and splendid satire displays the fertile invention of the poet, the variety of his illustration, and the unrivalled force and facility of his diction; but it is now read with a feeling more allied to pity than admiration-pity that one so highly gifted should have allowed himself to descend to things so mean, and devote the end of a great literary life to the infliction of retributary pain on every humble aspirant in the world of letters. I have often wondered,' says Cowper, that the same poet who wrote the "Dunciad" should have written these lines That mercy I to others show, Alas for Pope, if the mercy he showed to others was the measure of the mercy he received.' Sir Walter Scott has justly remarked, that Pope must have suffered the most from these wretched contentions. It is known that his temper was ultimately much changed for the worse. Misfortunes were also now gathering round him. Swift was fast verging on insanity, and was lost to the world; Atterbury and Gay died in 1732; and next year his venerable mother, whose declining years he had watched with affectionate solicitude, also expired. Between the years 1733 and 1740, Pope published his inimitable Epistles, Satires, and Moral Essays, addressed to his friends Bolingbroke, Bathurst, Arbuthnot, &c., and containing the most noble and generous sentiments, mixed up with withering invective and the fiercest denunciations. In 1742 he added a fourth book to the 'Dunciad,' displaying the final advent of the goddess to destroy order and science, and to substitute the kingdom of the dull upon earth. The point of his individual satire, and the richness and boldness of his general design, attest the undiminished powers and intense feeling of the poet. Next year Pope prepared a new edition of the four books of the Dunciad,' and elevated Colley Cibber to the situation of hero of the poem. This unenviable honour had previously been enjoyed by Theobald, a tasteless critic and commentator on Shakspeare; but in thus yielding to his personal dislike of Cibber, Pope injured the force of his satire. The laureate, as Warton justly remarks, with a great stock of levity, vanity, and affectation, had sense, and wit, and humour; and the author of the "Careless Husband" was by no means a proper king of the dunces.' Cibber was all vivacity and conceit-the very reverse of personified dulness, Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound. Political events came in the rear of this accumulated and vehement satire to agitate the last days of Pope. · government to issue a proclamation prohibiting every Roman Catholic from appearing within ten miles of London. The poet complied with the proclamation; and he was soon afterwards too ill to be in town. This additional proclamation from the Highest of all Powers,' as he terms his sickness, he submitted to without murmuring. A constant state of excitement, added to a life of ceaseless study and contemplation, operating on a frame naturally delicate and deformed from birth, had completely exhausted the powers of Pope. He complained of his inability to think; yet, a short time before his death, he said, 'I am so certain of the soul's being immortal, that I seem to feel it within me as it were by intuition.' Another of his dying remarks was, There is nothing that is meritorious but virtue and friendship; and, indeed, friendship itself is only a part of virtue.' He died at Twickenham on the 30th of May, 1744. The character and genius of Pope have given rise to abundance of comment and speculation. The occasional fierceness and petulance of his satire cannot be justified, even by the coarse attacks of his opponents, and must be ascribed to his extreme sensibility, to over-indulged vanity, and to a hasty and irritable temper. His sickly constitution debarring him from active pursuits, he placed too high a value on mere literary fame, and was deficient in the manly virtues of sincerity and candour. At the same time he was a public benefactor, by stigmatising the vices of the great, and lashing the absurd pretenders to taste and literature. He was a fond and steady friend; and in all our literary biography, there is nothing finer than his constant undeviating affection and reverence for his venerable parents. Me let the tender office long engage, To rock the cradle of reposing age; With lenient arts extend a mother's breath, Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death; Explore the thought, explain the asking eye, And keep at least one parent from the sky. Prologue to the Satires. As a poet, it would be absurd to rank Pope with the greatest masters of the lyre; with the universality of Shakspeare, or the sublimity of Milton. He was undoubtedly more the poet of artificial life and manners than the poet of nature. He was a nice observer and an accurate describer of the phenomena of the mind, and of the varying shades and gradations of vice and virtue, wisdom and folly. He was too fond of point and antithesis, but the polish of the weapon was equalled by its keenness. Let us look,' says Campbell, 'to the spirit that points his antithesis, and to the rapid precision of his thoughts, and we shall forgive him for being too antithetic and sententious.' His wit, fancy, and good sense, are as remarkable as his satire. His elegance has never been surpassed, or perhaps equalled: it is a combination of intellect, imagination, and taste, under the direction of an independent spirit and refined moral feeling. If he had studied more in the school of nature and of Shakspeare, and less in the school of Horace and Boileau; if he had cherished the frame and spirit in which he composed the Elegy' and the Eloisa,' and forgot his too exclusive devotion to that which inspired the 'Dunciad,' the world would have hallowed his memory with a still more affectionate and permanent interest than even that which waits on him as one of our most brilliant and accomplished English poets. Mr Campbell in his 'Specimens' has given an eloquent estimate of the general powers of Pope, with reference to his position as a poet:-That Pope was neither so insensible to the beauties of nature, nor so indistinct in describing them, as to forget the character of a genuine poet, is what I mean to urge, without exaggerating his picturesqueness. But before speaking of that quality in his writings, I would beg leave to observe, in the first place, that the faculty by which a poet luminously describes objects of art, is essentially the same faculty which enables him to be a faithful describer of simple nature; in the second place, that nature and art are to a greater degree relative terms in poetical description than is generally recollected; and thirdly, that artificial objects and manners are of so much importance in fiction, as to make the exquisite description of them no less characteristic of genius than the description of simple physical appearances. The poet is "creation's heir." He deepens our social interest in existence. It is surely by the liveliness of the interest which he excites in existence, and not by the class of subjects which he chooses, that we most fairly appreciate the genius or the life of life which is in him. It is no irreverence to the external charms of nature to say, that they are not more important to a poet's study than the manners and affections of his species. Nature is the poet's goddess; but by nature, no one rightly understands her mere inanimate face, however charming it may be, or the simple landscapepainting of trees, clouds, precipices, and flowers. Why, then, try Pope, or any other poet, exclusively by his powers of describing inanimate phenomena? Nature, in the wide and proper sense of the word, means life in all its circumstances-nature, moral as well as external. As the subject of inspired fiction, nature includes artificial forms and manners. Richardson is no less a painter of nature than Homer. Homer himself is a minute describer of works of art; and Milton is full of imagery derived from it. Satan's spear is compared to the pine, that makes "the mast of some great ammiral;" and his shield is like the moon, but like the moon artificially seen through the glass of the Tuscan artist. The "spiritstirring drum, the ear-piercing fife, the royal banner, and all the quality, pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war," are all artificial images. When Shakspeare groups into one view the most sublime objects of the universe, he fixes on "the cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples." Those who have ever witnessed the spectacle of the launching of a ship of the line, will perhaps forgive me for adding this to the examples of the sublime objects of artificial life. Of that spectacle I can never forget the impression, and of having witnessed it reflected from the faces of ten thousand spectators. They seem yet before me. I sympathise with their deep and silent expectation, and with their final burst of enthusiasm. It was not a vulgar joy, but an affecting national solemnity. When the vast bulwark sprang from her cradle, the calm water on which she swung majestically round, gave the imagination a contrast of the stormy element in which she was soon to ride. All the days of battle and nights of danger which she had to encounter, all the ends of the earth which she had to visit, and all that she had to do and to suffer for her country, rose in awful presentiment before the mind; and when the heart gave her a benediction, it was like one pronounced on a living being.' The Messiah. Ye nymphs of Solyma! begin the song: Rapt into future times, the bard begun : To leafless shrubs the flowery palms succeed, Pleased the green lustre of the scales survey, [The Toilet.] [From The Rape of the Lock.'] And now, unveiled, the toilet stands displayed, And keener lightnings quicken in her eyes. [Description of Belinda and the Sylphs.] Not with more glories, in the ethereal plain, Fair nymphs and well-drest youths around her shone, On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore, Yet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride, This nymph, to the destruction of mankind, The advent'rous baron the bright locks admired; He saw, he wished, and to the prize aspired. Resolved to win, he meditates the way, By force to ravish, or by fraud betray; For when success a lover's toil attends, Few ask if fraud or force attained his ends. For this, ere Phoebus rose, he had implored Propitious heaven, and every power adored; But chiefly Love-to Love an altar built, Of twelve vast French romances, neatly gilt. There lay three garters, half a pair of gloves, And all the trophies of his former loves; With tender billet-doux he lights the pyre, And breathes three amorous sighs to raise the fire. Then prostrate falls, and begs with ardent eyes Soon to obtain, and long possess the prize; The powers gave ear, and granted half his prayer, The rest the winds dispersed in empty air. But now secure the painted vessel glides, The sunbeams trembling on the floating tides: While melting music steals upon the sky, And softened sounds along the waters die; Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play, Belinda smiled, and all the world was gay. All but the Sylph, with careful thoughts opprest, The impending wo sat heavy on his breast." He summons straight his denizens of air; The lucid squadrons round the sails repair. Soft o'er the shrouds aërial whispers breathe, That seemed but zephyrs to the train beneath. Some to the sun their insect wings unfold, Waft on the breeze, or sink in clouds of gold; Transparent forms, too fine for mortal sight, Their fluid bodies half dissolved in light, Loose to the wind their airy garments flew, Thin glittering textures of the filiny dew, Dipped in the richest tincture of the skies, Where light disports in ever-mingling dyes; While every beam new transient colours flings, Colours that change whene'er they wave their wings. Amid the circle on the gilded mast, Superior by the head was Ariel placed; His purple pinions opening to the sun, He raised his azure wand and thus begun : Ye sylphs and sylphids, to your chief give ear; Fays, fairies, genii, elves, and dæmons, hear! Ye know the spheres, and various tasks assigned By laws eternal to the aërial kind. Some in the fields of purest ether play, And bask and whiten in the blaze of day; Some guide the course of wandering orbs on high, Or roll the planets through the boundless sky; Some, less refined, beneath the moon's pale light Pursue the stars that shoot athwart the night, Or suck the mists in grosser air below, Or dip their pinions in the painted bow, Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main, Or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain. Others on earth o'er human race preside, Watch all their ways, and all their actions guide: Of these the chief the care of nations own, And guard with arms divine the British throne. |