From Blackwood's Magazine. HISTORICAL SKETCHES OF THE REIGN NO. V.-THE POET. over other gainers of fame than is often attained to in this so-called unpoetical age. Had we asked our jolly waggoner who reigned a hundred years ago in the noble towers of Windsor, the man would probably have known nothing of George or Caroline-nothing of their great Minister, or of the lights of their strange court. But "Pope the poeter" had been heard of even among those silent fields. Is not this real fame? Had the mission been one of hero-worship, we might have been justified in entering into a description of the house, enlarged and widened out at every possible corner, but still enclosing, as in a shrine, at least one homely wainscot room of the original dwelling-place, which the present proprietor, with graceful, old-fashioned politeness, exhibited to the pilgrim. It is no longer "A little house with trees a-row, Not many weeks ago, in one of the glowing days of this fervid summer, the writer of these pages sought out the house in which Pope's conscious life began. In a rich, leafy, luxuriant country, wealthy with great trees and sweeps of immemorial turf, the soul of which is Windsor and its great Park, still shading off into broken relics of forest, lies, among the oaks and elm-trees, the scattered hamlet of Binfield—a place so tiny and so rude that it scarcely counts as a village. To find out the house of a poet who has been dead for more then a century, in the comfortable depths of Berks, where literature thrives poorly even on the higher levels, seemed a sufficiently hopeless task. It was a day of May that blazed like August, with a cloudless breadth of blue above, And, like its master, very low," and white waste of dust along the parched roads; and, happily, there were a few passers- but it retains the row of big-branched by about the front of the first roadside public storm-worn firs, with great trunks gleaming at which the inquiry was made. "Ask for red in the sunset, which doubtless inspired Pope's house," said the lady whose friendly the description; and on the lawn a rusty, aid attended the errant historian. John melancholy cypress, said to have been Thomas, the meekest of his race, to whom planted by the poet. It is not, however, the commission was given, looked the aston- our intention to treat the place as a shrine, ishment he would not speak at so disre-or surround with any attempt at worship spectful a mode of address. "If you the name of Pope. It is enough for our please, ma'am, Mr. Pope don't live there purpose that this name has survived for now," he said, helplessly, when he came back from the rural door, where a few waggoners and idlers immediately began to flutter over the little incident. Then there followed over the three-cornered bit of green which lay in front of the "Crown" the landlady, shading her eyes with her hand, to repeat this information, and enter into particulars about the "family" who had come into the house. But, in the mean time, the inquiry had roused a jolly spectator in a smock-frock, who knew better, and shouted cheery directions over the prim little woman's head. “Ay, to be sure, I knows it well! It's Pope the poeter's house," said this authority, with rural amplitude of detail as to the corners to be passed and cabarets to be encountered on the way. And we who sought the place looked at each other with a clearer conviction, perhaps, of the superiority of the Poet nearly a century and a half in the recollections of this slumbrous unpoetic district, which probably would own no thrill at the name of Tennyson or Browning were either to set up his rest at the present moment among its trees. In this leafy, level land, just where it begins to break and undulate-where oaks twist their great arms and throw their vast shadow, and rugged hollies grow to forest-treesAlexander Pope, a poor little deformed boy, was brought out of hot and busy London by an honest, worthy tradesman-pair of parents in the end of the seventeenth century. He was born in 1688, it is said, in Lombard street, where his father," an honest merchant, dealt in Hollands wholesale." Pope the elder had made money enough to retire from business at a comparatively early age. He had made ten thousand pounds, says one; and another raises the 66 66 amount to twenty thousand. Yet, not-to this apocryphal description, the poet's withstanding the proof of some knowledge father sprang from the younger branch of a of the world which is conveyed by the mak- family of good repute in Ireland, and reing of a moderate fortune, he is supposed lated to Lord Downe-an origin afterwards to have "found no better use for his money changed and elaborated into "a gentlethan that of locking it up in a chest and man's family in Oxfordshire, the head of taking from it what his expenses required" which was the Earl of Downe, whose sole -a waste of capital which has no analogy heiress married the Earl of Lindsay." It is with the shrewd character which he seems evident, however, that there is not a morto have transmitted to his son, nor, indeed, sel of evidence to support the story; it is it consistent with various ascertained parhad never been heard of" by his relatives, ticulars of their life. The house at Bin- and was probably set up, says his latest field, with twenty acres of land, was his biographer, “to shame Lord Hervey and own, and he had rent-charges on other Lady Mary," who had driven him frantic by property, and investments abroad, which a taunt at his birth obscure." The tawrescue his name from this stigma of foolish dry bit of invention looks pitiful enough at improvidence. The few particulars that this distance; but the family of Pope's remain on record of this unobtrusive father mother is less mysterious, and apparently reveal a shadow of peaceable respectability, had some claims to gentility. And the old retired and contented, a man busy in his people themselves, it is evident, made no garden, proud of his vegetables, interfering pretensions, but lived their quiet, virtuous, with little meaning but some success in his humdrum life in irreproachable independboy's childish studies. Pope, like his ence and modesty, tenderly indulgent to father, was deformed and weakly from his and pathetically proud of their poor little birth - a dwarfish, amiable, invalid boy, crooked, puny, sweet-voiced boy. with a sweet childish voice, and general indications of precocity. The tiny little house has every appearance of having been inspired by that extreme regard for personal comfort and narrow domesticity common to the class which its inmates belonged to. The good couple fondled and watched over their only child not without a careful eye to his education. They were Roman Catholics, and, as their son grandiloquently explains "Certain laws, by sufferers thought unjust, was The education of the poet does not seem, however, to have been retarded by his bodily weakness. He was taught to read at home, and taught himself to write by copying the printed letters from books, an accomplishment he retained all his life. His first education, he himself says, extremely loose and disconcerted." He fell into the hands of priests, one after another, and seems to have taken what learning they could give him without any of the bile with which, in such a time, a proscribed class would be likely to mingle it. At eight Denied all posts of profit or of trust," years old he was sent to a school in HampBut there is no indication of anything in the shire, and learnt the Greek and Latin rudielder Pope above the level of a retired ments together, growing acquainted at the shopkeeper, or which could have made this same time with the first beginnings of poetdenial of office a personal injury to him.ry in Ogilby's 'Iliad' and Sandys's 'Ovid.' No doubt he pottered about his garden, He was transferred shortly after to Twyand sat in the sun before his little country- ford, a Catholic school near Winchester, house as calmly as if he had been eligible where the precocious imp wrote a lampoon to the post of Prime Minister. Many years on his master, for which he was flogged. after, when Pope was at the height of his The punishment, however, was not allowed fame, it seems to have occurred to him that to work its due effect; for the indulgent the homely pair to whom he was always so father, thinking of his boy's weakness, faithful stood in need of embellishment; doubtless, and not of a "Dunciad" to and he would appear to have invented a come, withdrew the juvenile satirist in high pedigree for them which rests on no founda- offence, and placed him at a school in tion but that of his own word. According London, where his budding inclinations were cultivated in another direction. "He Such seems to have been, so far as the used sometimes to stroll to the playhouse," formalities of teaching go, the entire sum of says Dr. Johnson, "and was so delighted Pope's education. He had nothing more to with theatrical exhibitions that he formed a do with schoolmasters. He went home, and kind of play from Ogilby's Iliad,' with with boyish zeal attacked by himself every some verses of his own intermixed, which book he could lay hold of. Perhaps the weakhe persuaded his schoolfellows to act, withness of his little distorted frame may have the addition of his master's gardener, who personated Ajax." This was when he was about twelve, and was not apparently his first commencement as a maker of verses. "I began writing verses," he says, farther back than I can well remember." He "lisped in numbers," in short; and the father at home set the boy subjects for his baby doggrel, and was his first critic, sending him often back to "new-turn them," according to his mother's evidence, saying, "These are not good rhymes". -a characteristic beginning for the polished, elaborate, and much-corrected verse which he was thereafter to produce. 66 accounted for the strange life of mental excitement and indiscriminate study into which the boy threw himself, with all the trees and all the glades of Windsor calling upon him all day long to pursuits of a very different kind. Whether he might not have been a greater poet had he tossed the books aside and taken his inspiration from the soft slopes of the fair country round, the big-boled beeches, the play of sunshine on the multitudinous leaves, all the sights and sounds that make of a forest land a leafy paradise, it is impossible now to tell. Such was not the instinct of the growing poet. This is the highest picture with which observation At this age he had already so great an and genius could furnish him, of those glorienthusiasm for poetry that he induced some ous shades and breezy breadths of chamof his friends to take him to Will's Coffee-paign amid which his youth was passed: house, where he saw Dryden. It was but for a moment, but it was one of the recollections upon which he loved to dwell. He had already written an Ode to Solitude,' "in which there is nothing more than other forward boys have attained," says Dr. Johnson; but to the critic not imbued with that love of "correct" verse which belonged among its other virtues to the eighteenth century, the soft cadence of this schoolboy ode is more pleasing than the blank, harmonious waste of the Pastorals' or the other early poems. 66 Here waving groves a checkered scene display, corn, Like verdant isles the sable waste adorn." To be sure, it was not his fault if the bad taste of his time foisted a coy nymph into the breathing silence of those soft solemn woods. But it is curious how entirely untouched were his soul and his style by his early knowledge of one of the most beautiful phases of nature. Oaks do not grow, nor silken beech-leaves open out of the wondrous husk, in any scene of his choosing. He is ignorant how the little birds answer each other among the trees, and how the says the philosopher of twelve, in a not unusual strain of holiday satisfaction with his home. Some prophecy of the tall talk of his subsequent life is in the quaint grandeur of the title of "paternal acres" bestowed upon the little bit of forest land at Binfield, which had been no longer in his father's possession than he himself, the heir of the pro-wood-pigeons coo. The mavis and the merle perty, had been; but yet the verses are pretty, and have an echo in them of an older and richer strain than that which was to be eventually his. are never singing among the branches, nor is it a "good greenwood" to the boy-poet. There is no musing nor silence in him. Instead of the long summer dreams under the whispering leaves, with all the doors and windows of the young soul open, and "influences of soul and sense stealing in unconscious, it is a very different scene that opens on us when we glance at the lad at Binfield. He shut himself up in his room, built himself up with books, read till the stars twinkled in upon him unheeded, read while all the wonders of the sun-setting and sun-rising passed by unknown. He had nothing to do with the beauty outside. The dews fell not, the balm breathed not, for him. So far as this was the work of his weak and sickly body the pitiful spectator could but mourn over the young recluse; but it is evident that art was more congenial to him than nature, there as throughout all his life: : in this early period, and there is a copy of it in Lord Oxford's library. My first taking to imitating was not out of vanity but humility. I saw how defective my own things were, and endeavoured to mend my manner by copying good strokes from others. My epic was about two years in hand—from thirteen to fifteen." In this curious mental workshop, accordingly, the boy lived and laboured, with his windows shut, we may be sure, and the fever of toil on his worn face. It was a juvenile manufactory, where verse was already turned and returned, and where a correct couplet was reckoned the highest product of earth or heaven. All this unintermitting study must have raised to the point of positive worship the pride and faith of the father and mother in their gifted son. No doubt it was to them, as to most partially educated people, the crowning evidence of genius; and a degree of freedom most unusual at the time must have been granted to him in consequence; for we find him, in his fifteenth year, setting out for London on his own motion, and apparently alone, to add to the classic langua to have completely mastered a knowledge of French and Italian. It was thought "a wildish sort of resolution," but still it was given in to with an indulgence which speaks either of unbounded faith on the part of the elder Popes in their son's power of taking "My next period," he says, "was in Windsor Forest, where I sat down with an earnest desire of reading, and applied as constantly as I could to it for some years. I was between twelve and thirteen when I went thither, and I continued in this close pursuit of pleasure and languages till nineteen or twenty. Consider ing how very little I had when I came from school, I think I may be said to have taught my-ges-which, no doubt, he believed himself self Latin as well as French and Greek; and in all these, my chief way of getting them was by translation... The epic poem which I began a little after I was twelve, was 'Alcander, Prince of Rhodes.' There was an under-water scene in the first book; it was in the Archipelago. wrote four books toward it, of about a thousand verses each, and had the copy by me till I burnt care of himself, or of an immense power of it by the advice of the Bishop of Rochester a lit-self-will in the precocious lad. It would aptle before he went abroad. I endeavoured," pear-for there are no dates to speak of in said he, smiling," in this poem to collect all the the story that he spent about a year in beauties of the great epic writers into one piece. London with this object or pretence, and There was Milton's style in one part, and Cow-learned at least to read French; though the ley's in another; here the style of Spenser imi- fact of his addressing a letter in after days, tated, and there of Statius; here Homer and "Au Mademoiselles Mademoiselles de MaVirgil, and there Ovid and Claudian. . . . There ple-Durham," says little for his knowledge of were also some couplets in it which I have since the language. inserted in some of my other poems without alteration, -as in the Essay on Criticism' · "He removed for a time to London," says Dr. Johnson, "that he might study French and Italian, which, as he desired nothing more than to read them, were, by diligent application, soon despatched." Thus the imperfect, superficial self-education, with all its attendant vices of self-satisfaction and conceit, was completed. He seems to have attained to perfect independence at this early age, and had already begun to correspond with the old roués of the coffeehouses, Wycherly and Congreve, and to ape the man. 66 "He then returned to Binfield," proceeds Dr. Johnson, and delighted himself with his own poetry. He tried all styles and many subjects. He wrote a comedy, a tragedy, an epic poem, with panegyrics on all the princes of Europe; and, as he con fesses, thought himself the greatest genius that ever was." This perpetual unwholesome work and seclusion produced their natural results. He became very ill," and in despondency lay down prepared to die," says Mr. Carruthers, his latest biographer. He sent farewells to his friends, and among these was a priest, Thomas Southcote, who, on receiving Pope's valedictory communication, went immediately to consult Dr. Radcliffe, the eccentric but able physician. Radcliffe's prescription was a very simple one; the young man was to study less, and ride on horseback everyday. With this receipe the father posted to Binfield; and Pope, having the good sense to follow the prescribed course soon got well." This good office was kindly thought of and repaid. Twenty years after, Pope used all his influence through Sir Robert Walpole to get an abbacy in France for Southcote; one among many friendly offices which embellish his life. factured into the sprightly, the solemn, the to Wycherley, "from the town to the country .. Ours are a sort of modest inoffensive people, who neither have sense nor pretend to have any, but indulge a jovial sort of dulness. They are commonly known in the world by the name of honest, civil gentlemen. They live much as they ride-at random; a kind of hunting-life, pursuing with earnestness and hazard something not worth the catching-never in the way nor out of it. I can't but prefer solitude to the company of all these." The boy, even at this early period, was not without friends of a class who might have been supposed likely to polish and refine him. "He was, through his whole life ambitious of splendid acquaintance," says Johnson, with that latent contempt for the character of his hero which throws a curious tinge of depreciation into his narrative. One of his neighbours, Sir William Trumbull- - a man experienced in the world, and who had retired to the precincts of the Forest after a long diplomatic career- took up young Pope with a warmth of interest which probably only an old man, bored with his surroundings, and half pleased, half A little later, when he had become as amused by the devices of the vain and am- much of a man as he ever was, he once more bitious lad, could have felt. "They rode becomes conscious for a second of the outer out together almost daily, read their favour- world. "I assure you I am looked on in ite classic authors together, and, when ab- the neighbourhood for a very well-disposed sent, kept up a correspondence." Sir Wil- person," he says; "no great hunter, inliam was sixty, and his young friend but deed, but a great admirer of the noble sixteen; but, no doubt, the society of the sport, and only unhappy in my want of conaccomplished little humpback made a diver- stitution for that and drinking. They all sion to the old statesman from the monot- say 'tis a pity I am so sickly; and I think ony of the woodland rides and the dulness 'tis pity they are so healthy," the young of country neighbours. When the Pasto- man adds, with a certain sense of humour. rals' were written they were carried to this These brief notices are the only indications earliest patron to be criticised and approved; of his external life that can be gleaned out and Sir William must have felt his liking of one large volume of letters. Here and justified. Of the few letters that passed there in his poems he gives, it is true, an between this pair of friends, the old man's artful sketch of his home, in which the Pope are pleasant, indulgent, and affectionate; household is seen as through a magnifyingand the replies are as fine, abstract, and ar- glass-elevated, enlarged, and heightened. tificial as the letters of such a youth might It is the kind of sketch which would have be expected to be. The fact is, indeed, been suitable for the inmates of Chatsworth that almost everybody whose letters to him or Arundel - but is ludicrously grand are preserved surpasses the letters of Pope, when it refers to the cottage at Binfield which are always, in the first half of his life, with its twenty acres, however kindly and made-up specimens of composition manu- affectionate that home may have been. |