Hlustrations to Vol. X. PAGE ... 17 : : : ........................ : 1. Portrait of Pope Frontispiece. action Room .......... 59 15. Portrait of Dennis, by Hogarth 16. Portrait of Addison. 17. Pope translating Homer ...... 18. Pope on his way to Oxford ........ 19. The Wits at Button's discussing the merits of the rival editions of Homer ...... 20. Pope's Chair ......... .............. 21. Portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 22. Pope and Mary Lepell.... 23. Pope's Visit to Bath ...... 113 24. Portrait of Jervas .......... ............ .. 119 25. Pope's Villa...... .. 121 26. Seat of Lord Bathurst, Cirencester ......... 27. Pope commemorating the completion of the fifth volume of Homer.. 28. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu sitting to Kneller ....... ........... : : .............................. 153 ............ ................. 199 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 . 35. Portrait of Lord Chesterfield ................. ............ 36. Crowd of Authors besieging the Publishers to prevent the publication 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...... 44. Pope at Lord Cobham's, at Stowe ........ ..............to face 283 45. Pope reading Cibber's pamphlet ....... 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. ........... 296 49. Portrait of the Duchess of Marlborough .............. 50. Portrait of Lord Lyttelton ....... 51. Monument to Pope, in Twickenham Church...... 52. Fac-simile of the only full-length Portrait of Pope ...... 53. Bust of Pope, by Roubiliac ........ : : : ............. : Tirucirocircirarirarira LIFE OF POPE. CHAPTER I. POPB'S BIRTH, FAMILY, EDUCATION, AND STUDIES. HIS EARLY PATRONS AND FRIENDS. SIR WILLIAM TRUMBULL, WYCHERLEY, 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 em. ployed 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 B 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 bis 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 strongholdused 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. 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 that 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 |