ALEXANDER POPE 83 day reader, turning cautiously it may be languidly the records of that ancient controversy, wonders a little at the dust and hubbub. If he trusts to his first impression, he will, in all probability, be content to waive discussion by claiming for Pope a considerably lower place than for Shakespeare or for Milton ; and upon the point of his "correctness" will decide discreetly, in the spirit of the im- mortal Captain Bunsby, that much depends upon the precise application of the term. But let him have a care. The debate is an endless one, eternally seduc- tive, irrepressibly renascent, and hopelessly bound up with the ineradicable op- positions of human nature. Sooner or later he will be drawn into the conflict and cry his slogan with the rest. If, in the ensuing pages, their writer seems to shun that time-honored discussion, as well as some other notable difficulties of Pope's biography, he does so mainly lest they should, in Bunyan's homespun phrase, "prove ad infinitum and eat out The thing that he already is about," to wit, the recalling of Pope's work and story. Pope's father was a London linen - merchant, who, according to Spence, "dealt in Hollands wholesale." His mother was of good extraction, being the daughter of one William Turner, of York. Both were Roman Catholics, at a time when to be of that faith in England was to suffer many social disabilities ; and it was perhaps in consequence of these that, about the time of the Revolu- tion, the elder Pope bought a small house at Binfield, on the skirts of Windsor Forest. Here he lived upon his means and cultivated his garden, a taste which he transmitted to his son, who, under the care of his mother and a nurse named Mary Beach, grew from a sickly infant into a frail, large-eyed boy with a sweet voice, an eager, precocious temperament, and an inordinate love of books, from copying the type of which he first learned to write. Like his father, he was slightly deformed, while from his mother he derived a life-long tendency to head- ache. His early education was of a most miscellaneous character. After some tuition from the family priest, he passed to a school at Twyford, where he is said to have been flogged for lampooning the master. Thence he went to a second school, where he learned but little. As a boy, however, he had tried his hand at translating, and had tacked together, from reminiscences of Ogilby, a kind of Homeric drama to be acted by his playmates, with the gardener for Ajax. But his real education began at Binfield, where, when between twelve and thirteen, he resolutely sat down to teach himself Latin, French, and Greek. Between twelve and twenty he must have read enormously and written as indefatigably. Among other things, he composed an epic of Alcander, Prince of Rhodes, which is said to have extended to four thousand lines, and its versification was so fin- ished that he used some of the couplets long afterward for maturer work. His earliest critic was his father, who would sit in judgment on his son's perform- ances, ruthlessly " sending him down " when the Muse proved unusually stubborn. " These be good rhymes," he would say when he was pleased.
