Alexander Pope was born in Lombard Street, London, of Roman Catholic
parents, on the 22d of May, 1688. He was according to Johnson, more
willing to show what his father was not, than what he was; but his
principal biographers make him the son of a linen-draper, who had
grown rich enough to retire from business to Binfield, near Windsor.
Alexander was deformed from his birth, and of so delicate a
constitution, and such weakness of body, that he constantly wore
stays; and when taking the air on the water, had a sedan-chair in the
boat, in which he sat with the glasses down. He received the early
part of his education at home, and, when about eight, was placed under
the care of one Taverner, a Romish priest, who taught him the
rudiments of Latin and Greek. His taste for poetry was first excited
by the perusal of Ogilby’s Homer and Sandy’s Ovid; and, on his removal
to school at Twyford, near Winchester, he exercised his talents in
verse, by lampooning the master. He was next sent to a school in the
vicinity of Hyde Park Corner, whence his occasional visits to the
play-house induced such a fondness for theatrical exhibitions, that he
composed a play from Ogilby’s Iliad, with some verses of his own
intermixed, which was acted by his schoolfellows.
About twelve years of age, when he wrote his earliest production, The
Ode of Solitude, he was called by his father to Binfield, where he
improved himself by translating into verse the Latin classics, and in
reading the English poets. The versification of Dryden particularly
struck him, and he conceived such a veneration for the genius of that
poet, that he persuaded some friends to take him to the coffeehouse
which he frequented, and pleased himself with having seen him. As
early as 1702, he had put into more elegant verse Chaucer’s January
and May, and The Prologue to the Wife of Bath; and in the same year,
he translated the epistle of Sappho to Phaon, from Ovid. At this time,
the smoothness of his versification, which might be said to be formed,
surpassed his original; ‘but this,’ says Johnson, ‘is a small part of
his praise; he discovered such acquaintance both with human and public
affairs, as is not easily conceived to have been attainable by a boy
of fourteen, in Windsor Forest.’
In 1703, he passed some time in London, in the study of the French and
Italian languages; and on his return to Binfield, wrote a comedy, a
tragedy, or epic poem, with panegyrics on all the princes of Europe,
and, as he confesses, ‘thought himself the greatest genius that ever
was.’ Many of the productions upon which he founded this idea of
himself, he subsequently destroyed; nor is it from an earlier period
than 1705, that his life, as an author, is properly computed. In that
year, he wrote his Pastorals, which, together with the very elegant
and learned preface, received the praise of all the poets and the
critics of the time; to whose society he, in the following year, more
particularly introduced himself, by attending Will’s Coffee-house, in
London, where most of them used to assemble. His pastorals did not
appear until 1709, and in the same year he wrote, and in 1711
published, his Essay on Criticism, which he seems to have considered
either so learned or so obscure, as to declare that ‘not one gentleman
in sixty, even of a liberal education, could understand it.’ The piece
was translated into French and German, and however overrated may have
been the author’s estimation of it, has not been inadequately praised
by Johnson, who observes that it displayed extent of comprehension,
nicety of distinction, acquaintance with mankind, and knowledge both
of ancient and modern learning, not often attained by the maturest age
and longest experience. The essay, however, was not without opponents,
and was attacked in a bitter and elaborate pamphlet, by Dennis, in
consequence of some lines applied to him by Pope, whom he designated
as ‘a little affected hypocrite, who had nothing in his mouth at the
same time but truth, candor, friendship, good-nature, humanity and
magnanimity.’ In this year, he also wrote his Messiah, first published
in The Spectator, and his verses on the Unfortunate Lady, who, we are
told by Ruffhead, having been removed by her guardian into a foreign
country to avoid the addresses of Pope, put an end to her life by
stabbing herself with a sword.
His next production was The Rape of the Lock, which is considered the
most airy, the most ingenious, and the most delightful of all his
compositions. The origin of it is too well known to need repetition
here; but it is doubtful, as generally asserted, whether it had the
effect of reconciling the parties whose conduct gave rise to the
subject. On its first appearance, Addison called it a delicious little
thing, and urged Pope not to alter it: he was, however, too confident
of improving it to follow this advice, and considerably altered, and
added to, the poem. ‘His attempt,’ says Johnson, ‘was justified by its
success: The Rape of the Lock stands forward in the classes of
literature as the most exquisite example of ludicrous poetry.’ In
1712, he published The Temple of Fame, and, about the same period, his
Eloise to Abelard; to the composition of which he was led, according
to Savage, by the perusal of Prior’s Nut-brown Maid. In 1713, appeared
his Windsor Forest, the conclusion of which is said to have given pain
to Addison, both as a poet and politician; but this is doubted by
Johnson, who, in proof of the apparant friendship that continued to
exist between the two poets, refers to the prologue of Cato, written
by Pope, and also to a defense of that tragedy against the attacks of
Dennis. About this time, the subject of our memoir is said to have
studied painting under Jervis, and to have made progress enough to
take the portraits of several of his friends.
He now turned his attention to the completion of his Iliad, which he
offered to subscribers in six quarto volumes, for six guineas. The
subscription soon rose to an amount that, while it gratified, at the
same time alarmed him, when he thought of the extent of his
undertaking; which, he says, disturbed him in his dreams at night, and
made him wish that somebody would hang him. It was also given out, by
some of his enemies, that he was deficient in Greek; and Addison, who
does certainly, in this instance, seem to have been jealous of the
fame of Pope, hinted to the Whigs, with a view to impede the
subscription, that he was too much of a Tory; whilst this suspected
him to be of the other party, in consequence of his contributions to
Steele’s Guardian. His genius, however, carried him above all
difficulties; and at the rate of about fifty lines per day, he soon
completed the whole of the volumes, though his repeated alterations
delayed the appearance of the sixth until 1720. The clear profit which
he gained by this work amounted to £5,324 4_s._; a sum that relieved
him from his present pecuniary difficulties, and enabled him to secure
himself against future ones, by the purchase of considerable
annuities.
The Iliad, which is described by the author’s biographer already
mentioned, as not only one of the noblest versions of English poetry
ever seen by the world, but, as one of the greatest events in the
annals of learning, was a source of much annoyance to Pope, both
during its progress and after its completion. Whilst it failed to gain
him a patron, it also lost him a friend; the coldness of Addison he
returned with indignation, and the overtures of Lord Halifax with
indifference and contempt. He had taken umbrage at the conduct of the
former, in endeavoring to create a rivalry between his translation of
Homer and Tickall’s; the appearance of which, at the same time with
his own, he had good reasons for attributing to the instrumentality of
Addison. A reconciliation between them was afterwards attempted to be
brought about, by Steele; but the interview only increased their
mutual dislike, which continued to the end of their lives. Another
reason assigned for Pope’s quarrel with Addison, is, that he had given
one Gildon ten guineas to abuse the former in a letter, which was
published respecting Wycherley. ‘On hearing of which,’ says Pope, ‘I
wrote a letter to Mr. Addison, to let him know that I was not
unacquainted with this behavior of his; that if I were to speak
severely of him in return for it, it should not be in such a dirty
way; that I should rather tell him myself fairly of his faults, and
allow his good qualities; and that it should be something in the
following manner. I then adjoined the first sketch of what has since
been called my satire on Addison,――the character of Atticus.’ Our
author’s contempt for Lord Halifax arose from that nobleman’s delay in
the bestowal of his patronage, until he had secured some compliment,
in the way of dedication or otherwise, which the poet was not over
anxious to render. ‘They, probably,’ says Johnson, ‘were suspicious of
each other: Pope would not dedicate till he saw at what rate his
praise was valued; Halifax thought himself entitled to confidence, and
would give nothing unless he knew what he should receive.’
Pope had removed to his celebrated villa, at Twickenham, in the year
1715, when the first volume of his Iliad was published, from which
time he generally continued to reside there. In 1717, he collected his
former works into one quarto volume; and in 1720, partaking of the
national infatuation, he lost a slight sum of money in the South Sea
stock. In 1721, he was induced, by a reward of £217 12_s._, to give
his name and labors to an edition of Shakspeare, in which his various
errors were detected and exposed with all the insolence of victory, by
Theobald, in a book called, Shakspeare Restored. From this time, says
Johnson, Pope became an enemy to editors, collators, and verbal
critics; and hoped to persuade the world that he miscarried in this
undertaking only by having a mind too great for such minute
employments. The same authority tells us that, in 1723, he appeared as
a witness on the trial of Bishop Atterbury, and that, in the few words
he had to utter, he made several blunders. In 1725, appeared his
translation of the Odyssey, in which he was assisted by Broome and
Fenton; the former of whom he is said to have treated with great
illiberality. About the year 1726, he had the misfortune to be
overturned in the water whilst passing a bridge in a friend’s coach,
by which he narrowly escaped drowning, and lost the use of two of his
fingers from the breaking of the windows. Upon this occasion he
received a letter of consolation from Voltaire, whom he had previously
entertained at this table, where he is said to have talked with so
much grossness, that Pope was driven from the room.
In 1727, he joined with Swift in the publication of three volumes of
Miscellanies, wherein was inserted his Art of Sinking in Poetry; and
in the following year appeared his Dunciad, a general attack against
all the inferior authors of his time, whom he distinguished by the
appellation of The Dunces. ‘On the day the book was first vended,’
says Pope, ‘a crowd of authors besieged the shop; entreaties, advices,
threats of law and battery, nay, cries of treason, were all employed
to hinder the coming out of the Dunciad.’ The poem excited a great
sensation in all quarters, and was presented to the king and queen by
Sir Robert Walpole. It is said to have blasted the literary reputation
of all those whom it touched, and to have driven many of them to such
an extent of hatred against the author, that they held weekly clubs to
consider how they might injure him, and brought his image in clay for
the purpose of executing him in effigy. In 1731, he published a poem
on Taste, by which he incurred the odium of all parties, in
consequence of ridiculing, under the name of Timon, his former friend
and patron, the Duke of Chandos; to whom he wrote an explanatory
letter, as full of hypocrisy as his verses were of ingratitude. In
1733, he published anonymously, the first, and in 1735, under his own
name, the fourth part of his Essay on Man; the idea of which he
acknowledges to have received from Bolingbroke, who is said to have
ridiculed Pope as having advanced in it principles of which he did not
perceive the consequence, and as blindly propagating opinions contrary
to his own. Pope certainly appears to more advantage as a poet than a
theologist in this production; which was on its translation into
French, attacked with great skill by Professor Crousaz, of
Switzerland, who discovered that many of the positions contained
inferences against the doctrines of revelation. Warburton, however,
defended the essay, in a manner that ever afterwards secured him the
gratitude and friendship of Pope, who took the opportunity of
acknowledging that he had not explained his own meaning properly, and
of disclaiming any intention to propagate the principles of
Bolingbroke.
His next poems in succession, were An Epistle to lord Bathurst, the
Characters of Men and of Women, several imitations of Horace, Dr.
Donne’s Satires, and an Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. In 1737, he
published, by subscription, a quarto volume of his Correspondence; for
the previous publication of which, by Curill, whom he had prosecuted
in the house of lords, he accounts, in his preface, by saying that his
letters had been stolen from a friend’s library, and thence sent
privately to the press. There is, however, good reason to believe that
they were printed with his own connivance, in order to give him an
opportunity of subsequently publishing them himself, without incurring
the imputation of vanity. In 1738, at which time he was visited by the
Prince of Wales, and was of the opposition party, he published two
Satirical Dialogues, in which he attacked several statesmen, but with
a view rather of displaying his powers as a satirist than his
sentiments as a patriot. These works were followed, in 1742, by a
fourth book of The Dunciad, which brought on a paper war between
himself and Cibber; his attack against whom he repeated, in a new
edition of that work, in a strain of virulence that contributed more
to the amusement of his readers than to his own reputation. From this
time his vital powers gradually declined; he gave over original
composition, and passed his time in the correction and revisal of his
former works, and in social intercourse with his intimate friends, the
chief of whom appear to have been Warburton and lord Bolingbroke. An
asthma, with which he had been for some years affected, now
terminating in a dropsy, his end visibly approached; he met it with
resignation and calmness; and after having taken the sacrament, and
exclaimed, a short time previously to death, ‘there is nothing
meritorious but friendship and virtue!’ he expired, on the 30th of
May, 1744, so placidly that the attendants did not ascertain the exact
time of his dissolution. He was interred at Twickenham, where a
monument was erected to him by Warburton, to whom he lelft half his
library and the copyright of such of his works already printed as were
not otherwise disposed of.
The character of Pope has been differently estimated by his
biographers, Warburton, Bowles, Warton and Johnson. The last seems to
have treated it in the most impartial manner; but his view of it is
too diffuse and incongruous to be altogether satisfactory. Upon the
whole Pope seems to have been more deserving of praise than he is
represented; he has been considered exclusively in his literary
character to have had justice done to him as a man. His reputation
even as a poet, in the complete sense of the word, has been a subject
of dispute with many; but it is idle to deny him a title to which none
have so zealously, if so successfully, aspired. It is not to be denied
that, upon the ground-work of others, he has raised some of his most
beautiful superstructures; but from whatever sources he may have drawn
his ideas, he has transferred them immortally to his own verses, by
the manner in which he there enshrined them. His Iliad will probably
continue to supersede all other translations; whilst the exquisite
machinery of the sylphs in The Rape of the Lock, and the vigorous
animation and pathetic tenderness pervading his Verses on the
Unfortunate Lady, evince an original genius which may successfully
challenge competition: His avowed model was Dryden; between whom and
himself, Johnson, in drawing an elaborate comparison, says, that where
the one delights the other astonishes; that Dryden is sometimes
vehement and rapid,――Pope always smooth, uniform, and gentle. His
conclusion seems to be that the former wrote the brighter paragraphs,
the latter the better poems. ‘Pope,’ he observes, ‘had perhaps the
judgment of Dryden; but Dryden certainly wanted the diligence of
Pope.’ His Ode to St. Cecelia’s Day, the same authority thinks
inferior to Dryden’s, but his Epistle of Eloise to Abelard he ranks as
one of the most happy productions of human wit. For seductive
eloquence and splendor of imagery, his Essay on Man is unequaled; but
stripped of their ornaments, the sentiments will be found commonplaces
and the diction bombastic. His epistolary writings, composed,
doubtless, with a view to publication, attest the care and elegance of
his pen, but are too full of that affectation and ambition, with which
he himself confesses his early letters to have been vitiated.
Vanity and affectation were principal features in the character of
Pope; like Byron, he pretended a hatred of the world, whilst his
highest pleasure consisted in pleasing those who lived in it; and his
egotism is sufficiently manifest in the contempt with which he treated
all excellence in others that had not some affinity with his own. One
of his boasts was, that he never obtained the notice of one titled
acquaintance by adulation or servility; and Johnson, in confirming
this, says, that he never flattered those whom he did not love or
praised those whom he did not esteem. An exception to this, however,
appears in his conduct towards Lord Hervey and Lady Wortley Montagu,
in a memoir of whom he will be found apologizing in a strain of
meanness and hypocrisy commensurate with the grossness and
vindictiveness of his previous abuse. But though sometimes violent in
his attacks and mean in his retreat, he was warm and constant in his
friendships; and his social qualities, says Johnson, exhibit a
perpetual and unclouded effulgence of general benevolence. Though his
fortune was far from splendid, he assisted Dodsley with £100 to open a
shop, and of the subscription of £40 a-year that he raised for Savage,
£20 were paid by himself.
In his domestic concerns, he was frugal almost to parsimoniousness; in
proof of which, it is said, that he used to write his compositions on
the backs of letters; and after a scanty entertainment to two of his
guests, would place a single pint of wine, with two small glasses,
upon the table, and say, ‘Gentlemen, I leave you to your wine.’ He,
however, would sometimes give a splendid dinner to a party of his
friends, and is said himself to have been so great an epicure, that
his heart was often won by a present of some luxury for his table. He
used constantly to call for coffee in the night, when it is not
probable he took much sleep, if the story of Lord Oxford’s domestic be
true, that she was called from her bed, by him, four times in one
night, to supply him with paper, lest he should lose a thought. He did
not excel in conversation; and it was said no merriment of others, or
of his own, excited him to laughter. There appears to have been a
certain littleness and artifice in his intercourse with mankind,
particularly with regard to trifles, which made Lady Bolingbroke say
that ‘he played the politician about cabbages and turnips.’ In his
person, he was so much beneath the middle stature, that, to bring him
to a level with common tables, it was necessary to raise his seat; his
countenance was, upon the whole, prepossessing, and his eyes were
animated and expressive. His physical debility continued throughout
his life; to conceal the tenuity of his legs, he wore three pairs of
stockings; and being unable to dress or undress himself, could neither
retire to rest, nor rise, without assistance.
An important feature in his private history, is his intimacy with
Martha Blount, the daughter of a Catholic gentleman, near Reading, who
is said to have been his intimate confidant and companion through
life. She possessed great influence over him, and though she treated
him with great neglect for some time previous to his death, he left
her the greater part of his property. With this temporary exception,
those to whom Pope was attached, remained his warm friends to the
last; and Bolingbroke, who wept over him in his last illness, said, ‘I
never knew in my life a man that had so tender a heart for his
particular friends, or more general friendship for mankind.’ Having
discovered, however, after the death of Pope, whom he had commissioned
to procure a few impressions of his Patriot King, that he had ordered
one thousand five hundred copies to be privately printed, Bolingbroke
was so enraged at the transaction, that he exerted his utmost efforts
to blast the memory of the man over whom he had so lately shed tears
of affection and regret. For this artifice, of which the motive is not
apparent, Warburton attempted to apologize; but in so unsatisfactory a
manner, that it produced an answer, by Mallet, in A Letter to the most
Impudent Man living.
We conclude our memoir of this paradoxical character, with the
following anecdotes respecting him:――Lord Halifax having expressed
himself dissatisfied with several passages in Pope’s translation of
the Iliad, the latter observed to Garth, that, as he could not see
where any alteration could be made for the better, his lordship’s
observation had laid him under some difficulty. ‘All that you need
do,’ said Garth, laughing, ‘is to leave them just as they are; call on
Lord Halifax two or three months hence, thank him for his kind
observations on those passages, and then read them to him as altered.’
Pope followed his advice, waited on Lord Halifax some time after, said
he hoped his lordship would find his objections to those passages
removed, read them to him exactly as they were at first, and his
lordship was extremely pleased with them, and cried out, ‘ay, now they
are perfectly right; nothing can be better.’
On Pope’s receiving, at his house, the Prince of Wales, with the most
dutiful expression of attachment, the former remarked, ‘how shall we
reconcile your love to a prince with your professed indisposition to
kings, since princes will be kings in time?’ ‘Sir,’ replied the poet,
‘I consider royalty under that noble and authorized type of the lion;
while he is young, and before his nails are grown, he may be
approached and caressed with safety and pleasure.’ During his last
illness, a squabble happening between his two physicians, Dr. Burton
and Dr. Thompson, who mutually charged each other with hastening the
death of their patient by improper prescriptions, Pope silenced them
by saying, ‘gentlemen, I only learn by your discourse that I am in a
dangerous way; therefore all I now ask is, that the following epigram
may be added, after my death, to the next edition of The Dunciad, by
way of postscript――
Dunces rejoice, forgive all censures past,
The greatest dunce has kill’d your foe at last.
Pope, though some have attributed them to Young, is also said to have
composed, on being asked for an extempore couplet, by lord
Chesterfield, the following lines, with the pencil of that nobleman:――
Accept a miracle, instead of wit
See two dull lines with Stanhope’s pencil writ.