To detect his imitations were tedious and useless. What he takes he seldom makes worse; and he cannot be justly thought a mean man, whom Pope chose for an associate, and whose coöperation was considered by Pope’s enemies as so important, that he was attacked by Henley with this ludicrous distich:
Pope came off clean with Homer; but they say
Broome went before, and kindly swept the way[108].
POPE.
Alexander Pope was born in London, May 22, 1688, of parents whose rank or station was never ascertained: we are informed that they were of “gentle blood;” that his father was of a family of which the earl of Downe was the head; and that his mother was the daughter of William Turner, esquire, of York, who had, likewise, three sons, one of whom had the honour of being killed, and the other of dying, in the service of Charles the first; the third was made a general officer in Spain, from whom the sister inherited what sequestrations and forfeitures had left in the family.
This, and this only, is told by Pope; who is more willing, as I have heard observed, to show what his father was not, than what he was. It is allowed that he grew rich by trade; but whether in a shop or on the exchange was never discovered till Mr. Tyers told, on the authority of Mrs. Racket, that he was a linendraper in the Strand. Both parents were papists.
Pope was, from his birth, of a constitution tender and delicate; but is said to have shown remarkable gentleness and sweetness of disposition. The weakness of his body continued through his life[109]; but the mildness of his mind, perhaps, ended with his childhood[110]. His voice, when he was young, was so pleasing, that he was called, in fondness, “the little nightingale.”
Being not sent early to school, he was taught to read by an aunt; and when he was seven or eight years old, became a lover of books. He first learned to write by imitating printed books; a species of penmanship in which he retained great excellence through his whole life, though his ordinary hand was not elegant[111].
When he was about eight, he was placed in Hampshire, under Taverner[112], a Romish priest, who, by a method very rarely practised, taught him the Greek and Latin rudiments together. He was now first regularly initiated in poetry by the perusal of Ogilby’s Homer, and Sandys’s Ovid. Ogilby’s assistance he never repaid with any praise; but of Sandys he declared, in his notes to the Iliad, that English poetry owed much of its present beauty to his translations. Sandys very rarely attempted original composition.