Alexander Pope - Delphi Poets Series

by Alexander Pope

  Lewis Theobald (1688-1744), the original hero of the Dunciad, was a dramatist and translator, but is chiefly known as the author of Shakespeare Restored; or specimens of blunders committed or unamended in Pope’s edition of the poet (1726). This was followed two years later by Proposals for Publishing Emendations and Remarks on Shakespeare, and in 1733 by his edition of the dramatist in seven volumes. ‘Theobald as an editor,’ say the editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare, ‘is incomparably superior to his predecessors and to his immediate successor Warburton, although the latter had the advantage of working on his materials. He was the first to recall a multitude of readings of the first Folio unquestionably right, but unnoticed by previous editors. Many most brilliant emendations ... are due to him.’

  William Walsh (1663-1708) has chronologically little claim to be noticed here, for his poems were published before the beginning of the century, but he is to be remembered as the early friend and wise counsellor of Pope, and also as the author, I believe, of the only English sonnet between Milton’s in 1658, and Gray’s, on Richard West, in 1742.

  Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea (1660-1720), published a volume of verse in 1713 under the title of Miscellany Poems on Several Occasions, Written by a Lady. The book contains a Nocturnal Reverie, which has some lines showing a close and faithful observation of rural sounds and sights, as for example:

  ‘When the loosed horse, now as his pasture leads, Comes slowly grazing through the adjoining meads, Whose stealing pace and lengthened shade we fear, Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear; When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food, And unmolested kine rechew the cud; When curlews cry beneath the village walls, And to her straggling brood the partridge calls.’

  The Nocturnal Reverie, however, is an exception to the general character of Lady Winchelsea’s poems, which consist chiefly of odes (including the inevitable Pindaric), fables, songs, affectionate addresses to her husband, poetical epistles, and a tragedy, Aristomenes; or the Royal Shepherd. The Petition for an Absolute Retreat is one of the best pieces in the volume. It displays great facility in versification, and a love of country delights.

  Thomas Yalden (1670-1736), born in Exeter, and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, entered into holy orders (1711), and was appointed lecturer of moral philosophy. ‘Of his poems,’ writes Dr. Johnson, ‘many are of that irregular kind which, when he formed his poetical character, was supposed to be Pindaric.’ Pindarics were indeed the bane of the age. Every minor poet, no matter however feeble his poetical wings might be, endeavoured to fly with Pindar. Like Gay, Yalden tried his skill as a writer of fables.

  Note.

  Mrs. Veal’s Ghost (see pp. 186-187). A curious discovery, made by Mr. G. A. Aitken (see Nineteenth Century, January, 1895), makes it certain, he thinks, that ‘the whole narrative is literally true.’ He even hopes that the receipt for scouring Mrs. Veal’s gown may some day be found. Mr. Aitken seems to infer that Defoe’s other tales will also turn out to be true histories, but Defoe avers, with all the seriousness he expends on Mrs. Veal, that he witnessed the great Plague of London, which it is needless to say he did not.

  BRIEF LIFE OF POPE by Thomas De Quincey

  Alexander Lexander Pope, the most brilliant of all wits who have at any period applied themselves to the poetic treatment of human manners, to the selecting from the play of human character what is picturesque, or the arresting what is fugitive, was born in the city of London on the 21st day of May, in the memorable year 1688; about six months, therefore, before the landing of the Prince of Orange, and the opening of that great revolution which gave the final ratification to all previous revolutions of that tempestuous century. By the “city” of London the reader is to understand us as speaking with technical accuracy of that district, which lies within the ancient walls and the jurisdiction of the lord mayor. The parents of Pope, there is good reason to think, were of “gentle blood,” which is the expression of the poet himself when describing them in verse. His mother was so undoubtedly; and her illustrious son, in speaking of her to Lord Harvey, at a time when any exaggeration was open to an easy refutation, and writing in a spirit most likely to provoke it, does not scruple to say, with a tone of dignified haughtiness not unbecoming the situation of a filial champion on behalf of an insulted mother, that by birth and descent she was not below that young lady, (one of the two beautiful Miss Lepels,) whom his lordship had selected from all the choir of court beauties as the future mother of his children. Of Pope’s extraction and immediate lineage for a space of two generations we know enough. Beyond that we know little. Of this little a part is dubious; and what we are disposed to receive as not dubious, rests chiefly on his own authority. In the prologue to his Satires, having occasion to notice the lampooners of the times, who had represented his father as “a mechanic, a hatter, a farmer, nay a bankrupt,” he feels himself called upon to state the truth about his parents; and naturally much more so at a time when the low scurrilities of these obscure libellers had been adopted, accredited, and diffused by persons so distinguished in all points of personal accomplishment and rank as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lord Harvey: “hard as thy heart” was one of the lines in their joint pasquinade, “ hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure.” Accordingly he makes the following formal statement: “Mr. Pope’s 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. She had three brothers, one of whom was killed; another died in the service of King Charles [meaning Charles I.]; the eldest, following his fortunes, and becoming a general officer in Spain, left her what estate remained after the sequestrations and forfeitures of her family.” The sequestrations here spoken of were those inflicted by the commissioners for the parliament; and usually they levied a fifth, or even two fifths, according to the apparent delinquency of the parties. But in such cases two great differences arose in the treatment of the royalists; first, that the report was colored according to the interest which a man possessed, or other private means for biassing the commissioners; secondly, that often, when money could not be raised on mortgage to meet the sequestration, it became necessary to sell a family estate suddenly, and. therefore in those times at great loss; so that a nominal fifth might be depressed by favor to a tenth, or raised by the necessity of selling to a half. And hence might arise the small dowry of Mrs. Pope, notwithstanding the family estate in Yorkshire had centred in her person. But, by the way, we see from the fact of the eldest brother having sought service in Spain, that Mrs. Pope was a Papist; not, like her husband, by conversion, but by hereditary faith. This account, as publicly thrown out in the way of challenge by Pope, was, however, sneered at by a certain Mr. Pottinger of those days, who, together with his absurd name, has been safely transmitted to posterity in connection with this single feat of having contradicted Alexander Pope. We read in a diary published by the Microcosm,” Met a large hat, with a man under it. “And so, here, we cannot so properly say that Mr. Pottinger brings down the contradiction to our times, as that the contradiction brings down Mr. Pottinger.” Cousin Pope, “said Pottinger,” had made himself out a fine pedigree, but he wondered where he got it. “And he then goes on to plead in abatement of Pope’s pretensions,” that an old maiden aunt, equally related,” (that is, standing in the same relation to himself and to the poet,) “a great genealogist, who was always talking of her family, never mentioned this circumstance.” And again we are told, from another quarter, that the Earl of Guildford, after express investigation of this matter, “was sure that,” amongst the descendants of the Earls of Downe, “there was none of the name of Pope.” How it was that Lord Guildford came to have any connection with the affair, is not stated by the biographers of Pope; but we have ascertained that, by marriage with a female descendant from the Earls of Downe, he had come into possession of their English estates.

  Finally, though it is rather for the honor of the Earls of Downe than of Pope to make out the connection, we must obse
rve that Lord Guildford’s testimony, if ever given at all, is simply negative; he had found no proofs of the connection, but he had not found any proofs to destroy it; whilst, on the other hand, it ought to be mentioned, though unaccountably overlooked by all previous biographers, that one of Pope’s anonymous enemies, who hated him personally, but was apparently master of his family history, and too honorable to belie his own convictions, expressly affirms of his own authority, and without reference to any claim put forward by Pope, that he was descended from a junior branch of the Downe family. Which testimony has a double value; first, as corroborating the probability of Pope’s statement viewed in the light of a fact; and, secondly, as corroborating that same statement viewed in the light of a current story, true or false, and not as a disingenuous fiction put forward by Pope to confute Lord Harvey.

  It is probable to us, that the Popes, who had been originally transplanted from England to Ireland, had in the person of some cadet been re-transplanted to England; and that having in that way been disconnected from all personal recognition, and all local memorials of the capital house, by this sort of postliminium, the junior branch had ceased to cherish the honor of a descent which was now divided from all direct advantage. At all events, the researches of Pope’s biographers have not been able to trace him farther back in the paternal line than to his grandfather; and he (which is odd enough, considering the popery of his descendants) was a clergyman of the established church in Hampshire. This grandfather had two sons. Of the eldest nothing is recorded beyond the three facts, that he went to Oxford, that he died there, and that he spent the family estate. [Endnote: 2] The younger son, whose name was Alexander, had been sent when young, in some commercial character, to Lisbon; [Endnote: 3] and there it was, in that centre of bigotry, that he became a sincere and most disinterested Catholic. He returned to England; married a Catholic young widow; and became the father of a second Alexander Pope, ultra Sauromatas notus et Antipodes.

  By his own account to Spence, Pope learned “very early to read;” and writing he taught himself “by copying, from printed books;” all which seems to argue, that, as an only child, with an indolent father and a most indulgent mother, he was not molested with much schooling in his infancy. Only one adventure is recorded of his childhood, viz., that he was attacked by a cow, thrown down, and wounded in the throat.

  Pope escaped this disagreeable kind of vaccination without serious injury, and was not farther tormented by cows or schoolmasters until he was about eight years old, when the family priest, that is, we presume, the confessor of his parents, taught him, agreeably to the Jesuit system, the rudiments of Greek and Latin concurrently. This priest was named Banister; and his name is frequently employed, together with other fictitious names, by way of signature to the notes in the Dunciad, an artifice which was adopted for the sake of giving a characteristic variety to the notes, according to the tone required for the illustration of the text. From his tuition Pope was at length dismissed to a Catholic school at Twyford, near Winchester. The selection of a school in this neighborhood, though certainly the choice of a Catholic family was much limited, points apparently to the old Hampshire connection of his father. Here an incident occurred which most powerfully illustrates the original and constitutional determination to satire of this irritable poet. He knew himself so accurately, that in after times, half by way of boast, half of confession, he says,

  ”But touch me, and no Minister so sore:

  Whoe’er offends, at some unlucky time

  Slides into verse and hitches in a rhyme,

  Sacred to ridicule his whole life long,

  And the sad burthen of some merry song.”

  Already, it seems, in childhood he had the same irresistible instinct, victorious over the strongest sense of personal danger. He wrote a bitter satire upon the presiding pedagogue, was brutally punished for this youthful indiscretion, and indignantly removed by his parents from the school. Mr. Roscoe speaks of Pope’s personal experience as necessarily unfavorable to public schools; but in reality he knew nothing of public schools. All the establishments for Papists were narrow, and suited to their political depression; and his parents were too sincerely anxious for their son’s religious principles to risk the contagion of Protestant association by sending him elsewhere.

  From the scene [Endnote: 4] of his disgrace and illiberal punishment, he passed, according to the received accounts, under the tuition of several other masters in rapid succession. But it is the less necessary to trouble the reader with their names, as Pope himself assures us, that he learned nothing from any of them. To Banister he had been indebted for such trivial elements of a schoolboy’s learning as he possessed at all, excepting those which he had taught himself. And upon himself it was, and his own admirable faculties, that he was now finally thrown for the rest of his education, at an age so immature that many boys are then first entering their academic career. Pope is supposed to have been scarcely twelve years old when he assumed the office of self-tuition, and bade farewell for ever to schools and tutors.

  Such a phenomenon is at any rate striking. It is the more so, under the circumstances which attended the plan, and under the results which justified its execution. It seems, as regards the plan, hardly less strange that prudent parents should have acquiesced in a scheme of so much peril to his intellectual interests, than that the son, as regards the execution, should have justified their confidence by his final success. More especially this confidence surprises us in the father. A doating mother might shut her eyes to all remote evils in the present gratification to her affections; but Pope’s father was a man of sense and principle; he must have weighed the risks besetting a boy left to his own intellectual guidance; and to these risks he would allow the more weight from his own conscious defect of scholarship and inability to guide or even to accompany his son’s studies. He could neither direct the proper choice of studies; nor in any one study taken separately could he suggest the proper choice of books.

  The case we apprehend to have been this. Alexander Pope, the elder, was a man of philosophical desires and unambitious character. Quiet and seclusion and innocence of life, — these were what he affected for himself; and that which had been found available for his own happiness, he might reasonably wish for his son. The two hinges upon which his plans may be supposed to have turned, were, first, the political degradation of his sect; and, secondly, the fact that his son was an only child. Had he been a Protestant, or had he, though a Papist, been burthened with a large family of children, he would doubtless have pursued a different course. But to him, and, as he sincerely hoped, to his son, the strife after civil honors was sternly barred. Apostasy only could lay it open. And, as the sentiments of honor and duty in this point fell in with the vices of his temperament, high principle concurring with his constitutional love of ease, we need not wonder that he should early retire from commerce with a very moderate competence, or that he should suppose the same fortune sufficient for one who was to stand in the same position. This son was from his birth deformed. That made it probable that he might not marry. If he should, and happened to have children, a small family would find an adequate provision in the patrimonial funds; and a large one at the worst could only throw him upon the same commercial exertions to which he had been obliged himself. The Roman Catholics, indeed, were just then situated as our modern Quakers are. Law to the one, as conscience to the other, closed all modes of active employment except that of commercial industry. Either his son, therefore, would be a rustic recluse, or, like himself, he would be a merchant.

  With such prospects, what need of an elaborate education? And where was such an education to be sought? At the petty establishments of the suffering Catholics, the instruction, as he had found experimentally, was poor. At the great national establishments his son would be a degraded person; one who was permanently repelled from every arena of honor, and sometimes, as in cases of public danger, was banished from the capital, deprived of his house, left defenceless against commo
n ruffians, and rendered liable to the control of every village magistrate. To one in these circumstances solitude was the wisest position, and the best qualification, for that was an education that would furnish aids to solitary thought. No need for brilliant accomplishments to him who must never display them; forensic arts, pulpit erudition, senatorial eloquence, academical accomplishments — these would be lost to one against whom the courts, the pulpit, the senate, the universities, were closed. Nay, by possibility worse than lost; they might prove so many snares or positive bribes to apostasy. Plain English, therefore, and the high thinking of his compatriot authors, might prove the best provision for the mind of an English Papist destined to seclusion.

  Such are the considerations under which we read and interpret the conduct of Pope’s parents; and they lead us to regard as wise and conscientious a scheme which, under ordinary circumstances, would have been pitiably foolish. And be it remembered, that to these considerations, derived exclusively from the civil circumstances of the family, were superadded others derived from the astonishing prematurity of the individual. That boy who could write at twelve years of age the beautiful and touching stanzas on Solitude, might well be trusted with the superintendence of his own studies. And the stripling of sixteen, who could so far transcend in good sense the accomplished statesmen or men of the world with whom he afterwards corresponded, might challenge confidence for such a choice of books as would best promote the development of his own faculties.