[1] In 1664 in the Parish of St. Nicholas Aeons (see "Diet, of Nat. Biog." referring to the list of Baptisms in that Church).
[2] In the Achæan myth, first mentioned in the "Iliad," we read that "Œdipus fell," the Greek word is that used for falling in battle.
[CHAPTER XXVI.]
AUGUSTAN POETRY.
Alexander Pope.
Alexander Pope, the son of Catholic parents in the trading class, was born in the year of Revolution, 1688. His education was private, priests were his tutors, but he acquired Latin, and was from childhood a great reader of poetry, and an imitator of what he read. He was not born deformed, but overstudy, perhaps, or unnoted accident, made him the stunted and crooked thing that he became, while his health, and the hideous personal insults which his enemies used as freely as Hazlitt did in later times, exasperated his temper.
His parents withdrew to Windsor Forest, a centre of Catholic families like the Blounts and Englefields. Pope was early introduced to the coffee-house wits by the most chivalrous and accomplished of men, Charles Wogan, who, in 1719, rescued from prison in Austria, and brought to her affianced prince in Italy, Clementina Sobieska, mother of Prince Charles.
Pope corresponds very early, on literary subjects, with the veteran Wycherley (of whom Pope's account is, as always, quite untrustworthy) and with "knowing Walsh". He taught himself verse by translating the Latin poet Statius, and at 21 published, in 1709, his "Pastorals," "written at the age of 16," according to Pope.