Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets. William Howitt
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vicinity to town, and itself pretty thickly inhabited by people of rank and intelligence. From the time that his father purchased the property at Binfield, with the exception of a short time at school at Twyford, near Winchester, and at another school in Mary-le-bone, which was removed while he was there to near Hyde Park Corner, Pope never quitted Binfield as a residence till he bought Twickenham. He went soon after his twelfth year from school, and he continued to reside at Binfield till 1716, when he was twenty-eight years of age; and singularly enough, he lived at Twickenham twenty-eight years more, dying in May 1744, at the age of fifty-six.
As is the case of many other people, who, with all their philosophy, are not content to rest their claims to distinction on their own virtues and achievements, there was an attempt on the part of Pope to hang his family on an aristocratic peg; and, as was to be expected in the case of a man who did not spare his enemies and who wrote Dunciads, there was as stout an attempt to pull this peg out. In his epistle to Dr. Arburthnot, he makes this claim for his parentage:
"Of gentle blood, part shed in honor's cause,
While yet in Britain honor had applause,
Each parent sprang,"
And in a note to that epistle we are further informed, "that Mr. Pope's father was a gentleman of family in Oxfordshire, the head of which was the Earl of Downe, whose sole heiress married the Earl of Lindsay. His mother was the daughter of William Turner, of York," &c. In reply to this, Warton tells us, that when Pope published this note, a relation of his own, a Mr. Pottinger, observed that his cousin, Pope, had made himself out a fine pedigree, but he wondered where he got it; that he had never heard any thing himself of their being related to the Earls of Downe; and, what was more, he had an old maiden aunt, equally related, a great genealogist, who was always talking of her family, but never mentioned this circumstance, on which she certainly would not have been silent had she known any thing of it. That the Earl of Guildford had examined the pedigree and descents of the Downe family for any such relationship; and that at the Heralds' Office, this pedigree, which Pope had made out for himself, was considered to be as much fabricated as Mr. Ireland's descent from Shakspeare.
This was one of Pope's weaknesses. No man did more than he did in his day to free literature from the long degradation of servile, fulsome dependence on patrons. He created a property for himself by his own literary exertions, and set a splendid example to literary men of independence. He showed them that they might be free, honorable, and even wealthy, by their own means. He had the pride to place himself on equal terms with lords when they were intellectual, but he scorned to flatter them. It was a pride worthy of a literary man, and it was well that when he departed from this just feeling, and would fain set up a claim to rank with them on their own terms of family and descent—a proceeding which undermined his true and unassailable principle of the dignity of genius—that he should receive a due reprimand from the hands of his enemies. The moment that he abandoned in any degree the patent of God, the long and luminous descent of genius from heaven—a patent far above all other patents, a descent far higher than all other descents—it was a fitting retribution that the pigmies of the Dunciad should fling it in his face that his father was a mechanic, a hatter, or a cobbler, as it appears, from his reply to Lord Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, that they did; who themselves had thus addressed him in print:
"None thy crabbed numbers can endure,
Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure."
The simple fact was, that Pope's grandfather, the highest they could trace the family, was a clergyman in Hampshire. The second son was Alexander, the father of the poet. This Alexander was intended for mercantile offices, and was sent out to reside in a family in Lisbon, where he embraced Catholicism, and transmitted that faith to his son. He afterward settled in Lombard-street, in London, as a linen-merchant, where Pope was born; and, acquiring an independence, retired first to Kensington, and afterward to Binfield, where he purchased a house and about twenty acres of land. This was pedigree enough for a poet, who needs none. In a truer tone, he pronounces the genuine honors of both his parents and himself in these words: "A mother, on whom I never was obliged so far to reflect as to say she spoiled me; and a father, who never found himself obliged to say that he disapproved my conduct. In a word, I think it enough that my parents, such as they were, never cost me a blush; and that their son, such as he is, never cost them a tear."
Improving on this in his prologue to his Satires, he disclaims any adventitious distinctions for his parents whatever, and draws a beautiful character of his father:
"Born to no pride, inheriting no strife,
Nor marrying discord in a noble wife;
Stranger to civil and religious rage,
The good man walked innoxious through his age;
No courts he saw, no suits would ever try,
Nor dared an oath, or hazarded a lie.
Unlearned, he knew no schoolman's subtle art,
No language but the language of the heart;
By nature honest, by experience wise,
Healthy by temperance and by exercise;
His life, though long, to sickness passed unknown,
His death was instant, and without a groan."
From these parents, however, Pope inherited a feeble and crooked frame. This circumstance, added to his being the only child of his father, led to his domestic education and habits. When eight years old he was placed under the tuition of the family priest. From him he passed to the schools mentioned, and at the early age of twelve returned home. This, he says, was all the instruction he received. He continued, however, to educate himself; and as Milton had done in Buckinghamshire, so he at Binfield in the shades of Windsor Forest, pursued steadily his studies, both of books and nature. One of his earliest favorite books was Homer; and at Twyford school he wrote a satire on the master, for which he was severely castigated. Both these facts indicated his future character and pursuits. At Binfield he not only went on strenuously with the study of Latin, Greek, and French, but he commenced author. At twelve he wrote his Ode to Solitude; a subject with which his situation made him well acquainted. Pope was one of the very rare instances of a genius which was at once prococious and enduring. But the secret of this was, that he did not exhaust his young powers out of mere puerile vanity, but went on reading all the best authors, English, French, Italian, Greek, and Latin, and wrote rather to imitate and practice different styles. To his sedulous practice of all kinds of styles, as those of Spenser, Waller, Cowley, Rochester, Dorset, but especially Chaucer and Dryden, may be attributed that great mastery of language, and that exquisite harmony of versification, in which he has never yet been excelled.
A great advantage to him in these pursuits was the friendship of Sir William Trumbull, who was not only an excellent scholar, but a man of great taste, and had seen the world. Sir William had been embassador to the Ottoman Porte, and afterward one of the secretaries of William III.; he had now retired to East Hamstead, his native place, near Binfield, where he soon found out the promise of Pope, and became his guide and friend so long as he lived. Sir William introduced him to Wycherley, then an old man; Wycherley introduced him to Walsh; and the literary connections of the young poet spread so rapidly, that at seventeen he was an avowed poet, and frequented Will's Coffee-house, which was on the north side of Russell-street, in Covent Garden, where the wits of the time used to assemble; and where Dryden had, when he lived, been accustomed to preside. But even while giving his evenings to society of the highest kind here, he was, during the day, pursuing his studies in town, and particularly prosecuting, under good masters, his knowledge of French and Italian. Neither, freely as he had written, had he rushed so very prematurely into print; it was not till 1709, when he was twenty-one, that he published his Pastorals, including some verses of Homer and Chaucer, in Jacob Tonson's Miscellany. This miscellany seemed to be the great periodical of the time; but the same year in which Pope's contributions appeared in it, brought forth the Tatler, which was succeeded by the Guardian and Spectator.
In 1711 Pope published his Essay on Criticism: this was soon followed by the Rape of the Lock; and Pope, still only twenty-three, was at once on the pinnacle of popularity. In 1715, or at the age of twenty-seven, he had