te remained after
sequestration, and forfeitures of her family. To these circumstances our
poet alludes in his epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, in which he mentions his
parents.

Of gentle blood (part shed in honour's cause,
While yet in Britain, honour had applause)
Each parent sprang,--What fortune pray?--their own,
And better got than Bestia's from the throne.
Born to no pride, inheriting no strife,
Nor marrying discord in a noble wife;
Stranger to civil and religious rage,
The good man walked innoxious thro' his age:
No courts he saw; no suits would ever try;
Nor dar'd an oath, nor hazarded a lye:
Unlearn'd, he knew no schoolmen's subtle art,
No language, but the language of the heart:
By nature honest, by experience wise,
Healthy by temp'rance, and by exercise;
His life though long, to sickness past unknown,
His death was instant and without a groan.

The education of our great author was attended with circumstances very
singular; and some of them extremely unfavourable; but the amazing force
of his genius fully compensated the want of any advantage in his
earliest instruction. He owed the knowledge of his letters to an aunt;
and having learned very early to read, took great delight in it, and
taught himself to write by copying after printed books, the characters
of which he could imitate to great perfection. He began to compose
verses, farther back than he could well remember; and at eight years of
age, when he was put under one Taverner a priest, who taught him the
rudiments of the Latin and Greek tongues at the same time, he met with
Ogilby's Homer, which gave him great delight; and this was encreased by
Sandys's Ovid: The raptures which these authors, even in the disguise of
such translations, then yielded him, were so strong, that he spoke of
them with pleasure ever after. From Mr. Taverner's tuition he was sent
to a private school at Twiford, near Winchester, where he continued
about a year, and was then removed to another near Hyde Park Corner; but
was so unfortunate as to lose under his two last masters, what he had
acquired under the first.

While he remained at this school, being permitted to go to the
play-house, with some of his school fellows of a more advanced age, he
was so charmed with dramatic representations, that he formed the
translation of the Iliad into a play, from several of the speeches in
Ogilby's translation, connected with verses of his own; and the sever