anners of a well-bred person. When we have given some
attention to dissecting his style, we may indeed discover that a prose
model for to-day should have more variety and energy and occasionally
more precision; but such a conclusion does not mean that any writer of
this century would like the task of surpassing the _De Coverley
Papers_.

ALEXANDER POPE, 1688-1744

[Illustration: ALEXANDER POPE. _From the portrait by William
Hoare_.]

Life.--Alexander Pope was born in London in 1688. His father, a
devout Catholic, was a linen merchant, who gave his son little formal
schooling, but allowed him to pick up his education by reading such
authors as pleased his fancy.

He was a very precocious child. At the age of twelve he was writing an
_Ode on Solitude_. He chose his vocation early, for writing poetry was
the business of his life.

In his childhood, his parents removed from London to Binfield, a
village in Berkshire, nine miles from Windsor. When he was nearly
thirty years old, his translation of the _Iliad_ enabled him to buy a
house and grounds at Twickenham on the Thames, about twelve miles
above London. He lived here for the rest of his life, indulging his
taste for landscape gardening and entertaining the greatest men of the
age.

After early middle life, his writings made him pecuniarily
independent, but he suffered much from ill health. In his _Lives of
the English Poets_, Dr. Samuel Johnson says of Pope:--

"By natural deformity, or accidental distortion, his vital functions
were so much disordered that his life was a long disease... When he
rose, he was invested in a bodice made of stiff canvas, being scarce
able to hold himself erect till they were laced, and he then put on
a flannel waistcoat. One side was contracted. His legs were so
slender that he enlarged their bulk with three pair of stockings...

"In all his intercourse with mankind, he had great delight in
artifice, and endeavored to attain all his purposes by indirect and
unsuspected methods. _He hardly drank tea without a stratagem._"

The publication of his correspondence tangled him in a mesh of
deceptions, because his desire to appear in a favorable light led him
to change letters that he had sent to friends. His double-dealing,
intense jealousy, and irritability, due to his physical condition,
caused him to become involved in many quarrels, which gave him the
opportunity to indulge to the utmost his own satiric tendency.