Epistles and Essay on Man. Death of Gay, of Pope's Mother, and of Arbuthnot. Publication by Curll of Pope's Correspondence. Last of Teresa Blount, Mrs. Howard, Miss Ann Arbuthnot, Biddy Floyd, II. LETTERS OF VOITURE'S PUBLISHED AS POPE's. Note by Douce, Extract from Grub-street Journal III. PLAN OF POPE'S GARDEN AND GROTTO, BY J. SEARLE IV. POPE'S WILL AND ESTATE. Mrs. Rackett opposes the adminis- V. RELICS OF POPE. Seal Ring presented to Warburton. Snuff-box 5. POPE (WHEN YOUNG) FIRST SEES DRYDEN AT WILL'S COFFEE-HOUSE 6. POPE AND SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS IN AN AUCTION ROOM 23 23. CROWD OF AUTHORS BESIEGING THE PUBLISHERS TO PRE VENT THE PUBLICATION OF THE DUNCIAD PAGE 24. PORTRAIT OF DR. T. WARTON 25. PORTRAIT OF ARBUTHNOT 26. VIEW IN BATH 27. POPE AT LORD COBHAM'S, AT STOWE. 28. POPE ON THE THAMES, AT TWICKENHAM HIS DEATH 30. PORTRAIT OF LORD LYTTELTON 31. MONUMENT TO POPE IN TWICKENHAM CHURCH to face 264 299 310 369 to face 376 to face 381 32. FAC-SIMILE OF THE ONLY FULL-LENGTH PORTRAIT OF POPE 33. BUST OF POPE BY ROUBILIAC 34. PLAN OF POPE'S GARDEN LIFE OF POPE. CHAPTER I. [1688-1708.] POPE'S BIRTH, FAMILY, AND EDUCATION. HIS EARLY FRIENDS, SIR WILLIAM TRUMBULL, WYCHERLEY, WALSH, AND HENRY CROMWELL. 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 as 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 employed 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 the poet's 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 and masculine; and no one approached im in command of the stores of our language-whether B 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 his posthumous fame. He trusted that his friend would be kind to his remains, and defend him from "the insulting foe," shading those laurels 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 stronghold-used 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. 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 author, having "the vision and the faculty divine," was ever so free as Pope from all superstitious weakness or overpowering romance of sentiment. |