No More Learning

He had to be laced up in stiff stays in
order to sit erect, and wore a fur doublet and three pairs of stockings
to protect himself against the cold. With these physical defects he had
the extreme sensitiveness of mind that usually accompanies chronic ill
health, and this sensitiveness was outraged incessantly by the brutal
customs of the age. Pope's enemies made as free with his person as with
his poetry, and there is little doubt that he felt the former attacks
the more bitterly of the two. Dennis, his first critic, called him "a
short squab gentleman, the very bow of the God of love; his outward form
is downright monkey. " A rival poet whom he had offended hung up a rod in
a coffee house where men of letters resorted, and threatened to whip
Pope like a naughty child if he showed his face there. It is said,
though perhaps not on the best authority, that when Pope once forgot
himself so far as to make love to Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the lady's
answer was "a fit of immoderate laughter. " In an appendix to the
'Dunciad' Pope collected some of the epithets with which his enemies had
pelted him, "an ape," "an ass," "a frog," "a coward," "a fool," "a
little abject thing. " He affected, indeed, to despise his assailants,
but there is only too good evidence that their poisoned arrows rankled
in his heart. Richardson, the painter, found him one day reading the
latest abusive pamphlet. "These things are my diversion," said the poet,
striving to put the best face on it; but as he read, his friends saw his
features "writhen with anguish," and prayed to be delivered from all
such "diversions" as these. Pope's enemies and their savage abuse are
mostly forgotten to-day. Pope's furious retorts have been secured to
immortality by his genius. It would have been nobler, no doubt, to have
answered by silence only; but before one condemns Pope it is only fair
to realize the causes of his bitterness.

Pope's education was short and irregular. He was taught the rudiments of
Latin and Greek by his family priest, attended for a brief period a
school in the country and another in London, and at the early age of
twelve left school altogether, and settling down at his father's house
in the country began to read to his heart's delight.
He roamed through
the classic poets, translating passages that pleased him, went up for a
time to London to get lessons in French and Italian, and above all read
with eagerness and attention the works of older English poets,--Spenser,
Waller, and Dryden. He had already, it would seem, determined to become
a poet, and his father, delighted with the clever boy's talent, used to
set him topics, force him to correct his verses over and over, and
finally, when satisfied, dismiss him with the praise, "These are good
rhymes. " He wrote a comedy, a tragedy, an epic poem, all of which he
afterward destroyed and, as he laughingly confessed in later years, he
thought himself "the greatest genius that ever was. "

Pope was not alone, however, in holding a high opinion of his talents.
While still a boy in his teens he was taken up and patronized by a
number of gentlemen, Trumbull, Walsh, and Cromwell, all dabblers in
poetry and criticism. He was introduced to the dramatist Wycherly,
nearly fifty years his senior, and helped to polish some of the old
man's verses. His own works were passed about in manuscript from hand to
hand till one of them came to the eyes of Dryden's old publisher,
Tonson. Tonson wrote Pope a respectful letter asking for the honor of
being allowed to publish them. One may fancy the delight with which the
sixteen-year-old boy received this offer. It is a proof of Pope's
patience as well as his precocity that he delayed three years before
accepting it. It was not till 1709 that his first published verses, the
'Pastorals', a fragment translated from Homer, and a modernized version
of one of the 'Canterbury Tales', appeared in Tonson's 'Miscellany'.

With the publication of the 'Pastorals', Pope embarked upon his life as
a man of letters. They seem to have brought him a certain recognition,
but hardly fame. That he obtained by his next poem, the 'Essay on
Criticism', which appeared in 1711. It was applauded in the 'Spectator',
and Pope seems about this time to have made the acquaintance of Addison
and the little senate which met in Button's coffee house. His poem the
'Messiah' appeared in the 'Spectator' in May 1712; the first draft of
'The Rape of the Lock' in a poetical miscellany in the same year, and
Addison's request, in 1713, that he compose a prologue for the tragedy
of 'Cato' set the final stamp upon his rank as a poet.