Cried: Madam, why, surely my master's possessed. 'Dear madam, had you but the spirit to tease, "Till he gave me my will, I would give him no rest; 'Dear madam, whene'er of a barrack I think, At Hamilton's Bawn, and the troop is arrived; And waits on the captain betimes the next morning. I hope you will use my house as your own.' Go, bring me my smock, and leave off your prate; See now comes the captain all daubed with gold-lace; And see how he rides like a lord of the land, With the fine flaming sword that he holds in his hand; And his horse, the dear creter, it prances and rears, With ribbons and knots at its tail and its ears; At last comes the troop, by the word of command, Drawn up in our court, when the captain cries "Stand." Your ladyship lifts up the sash to be seen (For sure I had dizened you out like a queen); The captain, to shew he is proud of the favour, 1 Two of Sir Arthur's managers. Looks up to your window, and cocks up his beaver. For the right holds the sword, and the left holds the bridle); As a compliment due to a lady so fair; 66 (How I tremble to think of the blood it hath spilt !) 'Hist, hussy; I think I hear somebody coming;' The dean and the doctor (1) have humbled their pride, And, because he's their betters, you carve for him first. The parsons for envy are ready to burst; The servants amazed are scarce ever able To keep off their eyes, as they wait at the table; To peep at the captain in all his fine clothes; Do but hear on the clergy how glib his tongue ran; A hundred to one but it covers a clown; Observe how a parson comes into a room; A scholard, when just from his college broke loose, Your Noveds and Bluturks and Omurs (2) and stuff, 1 Dr. Jenny, a clergyman in the neighbourhood. 2 Ovids, Plutarchs, Homers. My schoolmaster called me a dunce and a fool, Thus merciless Hannah ran on in her talk, Till she heard the dean call: Will your ladyship walk?' ALEXANDER POPE. United with Swift in friendship and in fame, but possessing far higher powers as a poet, and more refined taste as a satirist, was ALEXANDER POPE, born in London, May 21, 1688. He claimed to be of gentle blood,' and stated that his father was of a gentleman's family in Oxfordshire, the head of which was the Earl of Downe; his mother was the daughter of William Turner, Esq. of York. To this information, a relative of the poet added, that Pope's grandfather was a clergyman in Hampshire, who had two sons, the younger of whom, Alexander, the poet's father, was sent to Lisbon to be placed in a mercantile house, and that there he became a Roman Catholic. Recent researches have been directed to the poet's personal history, and it has been found that at the proper period (from 1631 to 1645), there was a Hampshire clergyman of the name of Alexander Pope, rector of Thruxton, and holding two other livings in the same county; but as there is no memorial of him in the church, and no entry in the register of his having had children, it is still doubtful whether this rector of Thruxton was an ancestor of the poet. The poet's maternal descent has been clearly traced.* His grandfather, Mr. William Turner, held property in Yorkshire, including the manor of Towthorpe, which he inherited from his uncle. He was wealthy, but did not take rank amongst the gentry, as there is no mention of the 1 Nicknames for my lady. Critical and Historical Tracts, by Joseph Hunter, No. 5. London. 1857. Turner family in the Herald's Visitations.' Of the reputed alliance with the Earls of Downe there is no proof; if the poet's family was of the same stock, it must have been two centuries before his birth, when the Popes, afterwards ennobled as Earls of Downe, were in the rank of humble yeomen. In 1677 the poet's father is found carrying on business as a linen-merchant in London, and having acquired a respectable competency by trade, and additional property by his marriage with Edith Turner-who enjoyed £70 per annum, a rent-charge on an estate in Yorkshire-he retired from business about the year 1688, to a small estate which he had purchased at Binfield, near Windsor. The poet was partly educated by the family priest. He was afterwards sent to a Catholic seminary at Twyford, near Winchester, where he lampooned his teacher, was severely whipped, and then removed to a small school in London, where he learned little or nothing. In his twelfth or thirteenth year, he returned home to Binfield, and devoted himself to a course of self-instruction, and to the enthusiastic pursuit of literature. He delighted to remember that he had seen Dryden; and as Dryden died on the 1st of May 1700, his youthful admirer could not have been quite twelve years of age. But Pope was then a poet. As yet a child, and all unknown to fame, I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. At the age of sixteen, he had commenced his 'Pastorals,' translated part of Statius, and written imitations of Waller and other English poets. He soon became acquainted with some of the most eminent persons of the age-with Walsh, Wycherley, Congreve, Lansdowne, and Garth; and from this time his life was that of a popular poet enjoying high social distinction. His 'Pastorals' were published in Tonson's Miscellany' in 1709. In 1711 appeared his Essay on Criticism,' which is said to have been composed two years before publication, when Pope was only twenty-one. The ripeness of judgment which it displays is remarkable. Addison commended the 'Essay warmly in the Spectator,' and it soon rose into great popularity. The style of Pope was now formed and complete. His versification was that of his master, Dryden, but he gave the heroic couplet a peculiar terseness, correctness, and melody. The Essay' was shortly afterwards followed by the Rape of the Lock' (1712). The stealing of a lock of hair from a beauty of the day, Miss Arabella Fermor, by her lover, Lord Petre, was taken seriously, and caused an estrangement between the families, and Pope wrote his poem to make a jest of the affair, and laugh them together again.' In this he did not succeed, but he added greatly to his reputation by the effort. The machinery of the poem, founded upon the Rosicrucian theory, that the elements are inhabited by spirits, which they called sylphs, gnomes, nymphs, and salamanders, was added in 1713, and published in the spring of 1714. The addition forms the most perfect work of Pope's genius and art. Sylphs had been previously mentioned as invisible attendants on the fair, and the idea is shadowed out in Shakspeare's Ariel, and the amusements of the fairies in the Midsummer Night's Dream.' But Pope has blended the most delicate satire with the most lively fancy, and produced the finest and most brilliant mock-heroic poem in the world. It is,' says Johnson,' the most airy, the most ingenious, and the most delightful of all Pope's compositions.' In 1713 appeared his Windsor Forest,' evidently founded on Denham's ' Cooper's Hill,' which it far excels. Pope was, properly speaking, no mere descriptive poet. He made the picturesque subservient to views of historical events, or to sketches of life and morals. But most of the Windsor Forest' being composed in his earlier years, amidst the shades of those noble woods which he selected for the theme of his verse, there is in this poem a greater display of sympathy with external nature and rural objects than in any of his other works. The lawns and glades of the forest, the russet plains, and blue hills, and even the purple dyes' of the 'wild heath,' had struck his young imagination. ~ His account of the dying pheasant is a finished picture— See from the brake the whirring pheasant springs, And mounts exulting on triumphant wings; Short is his joy; he feels the fiery wound, Flutters in blood, and panting beats the ground. Ah! what avail his glossy varying dyes, His purple crest and scarlet-circled eyes; The vivid green his shining plumes unfold, His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold? Another fine painting of external nature, as picturesque as any to be found in the purely descriptive poets, is the winter-piece in the Temple of Fame'-a vision after Chaucer, published by Pope, in 1715 So Zembla's rocks-the beauteous work of frost- Till the bright mountains prop the incumbent sky: The gathered winter of a thousand years. Pope now commenced his translation of the 'Iliad,' for which he issued proposals in 1713. It was published at intervals between 1715 and 1720. At first, the gigantic task oppressed him with its difficulty. He was but an indifferent Greek scholar; but gradually he grew more familiar with Homer's images and expressions, and in a short time was able to despatch fifty verses a day. Great part of the manuscript was written upon the backs and covers of letters, evincing that it was not without reason Swift called him paper-sparing Pope. The poet obtained a clear sum of £5320, 4s. by this translation. His exclamation |