The dean was consulted in all points relating to domestic policy in general, and to the trade of Ireland in particular; but he was more immediately looked on as the legislator of the weavers, who frequently came to him in a body to receive his advice in settling the rates of their manufactures, and the wages of their journeymen. When elections were pending for the city of Dublin, many of the companies refused to declare themselves till they had consulted his sentiments and inclinations.

In 1727 died his beloved Stella, in the forty-fourth year of her age, regretted by the dean with such excess of sorrow as only the keenest sensibility could feel, and the most excellent character excite. After the death of Stella his life became very retired, and the austerity of his temper increased; his public days for receiving company were discontinued, and he even shunned the society of his most intimate friends.

We have now conducted the dean through the most interesting circumstances of his life, to the fatal period wherein he was utterly deprived of his reason, a loss which he often seemed to foresee, and prophetically lamented to his friends. The total deprivation of his senses came upon him by degrees. In the year 1736 he was seized with a violent fit of giddiness: he was at that time writing a satirical poem, called the "Legion Club;" but he found the effects of his giddiness so dreadful that he left the poem unfinished, and never afterward attempted a composition of any length, either in verse or prose. However, his conversation still remained the same, lively and severe; but his memory gradually grew worse and worse, and as that decreased he grew every day more fretful and impatient. From the year 1739 to the year 1744 his passions grew so violent and ungovernable, his memory so decayed, and his reason so depraved, that the utmost precautions were taken to prevent all strangers from approaching him, for till then he had not appeared totally incapable of conversation. He now, however, grew rapidly worse, and died in 1745. He had willed all his fortune to be used in founding a home for incurable madmen.[Back to Contents]

ALEXANDER POPE[3]
By Austin Dorson
(1688-1744)

More than two hundred years ago, on May 21, 1688, was born in Lombard Street, London, a poet whose influence, for nearly a century, reigned paramount in English verse. He had not been long dead, it is true, when his supremacy was contested, but to so little purpose that two decades passed away before his overbold assailant mustered courage to follow up his first attack. Then, after an interval, the challenge was renewed, and for a long period the literary world rang with the blows of the opposing champions. Was Alexander Pope a great poet or was he not? It was Thomas Warton who first put that question, and it was William Bowles who repeated it. Against Warton was Warburton; against Bowles were Byron and Campbell and Roscoe, with a host of minor combatants. When at last the contest seemed to droop it was only to begin again upon a new issue; and the lists shook beneath the inroad of De Quincey and Macaulay. Was Pope a "correct" poet? The latter-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 immortal 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 seductive, irrepressibly renascent, and hopelessly bound up with the ineradicable oppositions 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 Revolution, 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 headache. 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 Alexander, Prince of Rhodes, which is said to have extended to four thousand lines, and its versification was so finished 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 performances, ruthlessly "sending him down" when the Muse proved unusually stubborn, "These be good rhymes," he would say when he was pleased.