, notably Lord Byron, whose
letters to Mr. Bowles on the subject, though composed in his lordship's
most ruffianly vein, still make good reading--of a sort. But the battle
is over, at all events for the present. It is not now our humour to
inquire too curiously about first causes or primal elements. As we are
not prepared with a definition of poetry, we feel how impossible it would
be for us to deny the rank of a poet to one whose lines not infrequently
scan and almost always rhyme. For my part, I should as soon think of
asking whether a centipede has legs or a wasp a sting as whether the
author of the _Rape of the Lock_ and the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_ was
or was not a poet.

Pope's life has been described as a succession of petty secrets and third-
rate problems, but there seems to be no doubt that it began on May 21st,
1688, in Lombard Street, in the city of London. But this event over,
mystery steps in with the question, What was his father? The occupation
of the elder Pope occasioned nearly as fierce a controversy as the
poetical legitimacy of the younger. Malice has even hinted that old Pope
was a hatter. The poet, of course, knew, but wouldn't tell, being always
more ready, as Johnson observes, to say what his father was not than what
he was. He denied the hatter, and said his father was of the family of
the Earls of Downe; but on this statement being communicated to a
relative of the poet, the brutal fellow, who was probably without a
tincture of polite learning, said he heard of the relationship for the
first time! 'Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure,' sang one of
Pope's too numerous enemies in the easy numbers he had taught his age. It
is, however, now taken as settled that the elder Pope, like Izaak Walton
and John Gilpin, and many other good fellows, was a linen-draper. He
made money, and one would like to know how he did it in the troublesome
times he lived in; but _his_ books have all perished. He was a Roman
Catholic, as also was the poet's mother, who was her husband's second
wife, and came out of Yorkshire. It used to be confidently asserted that
the elder Pope, on retiring from business, which he did early in the
poet's childhood, put his fortune in a box and spent it as he needed
it,--a course of conduct the real merits of which are likely to be hid
from a lineal descendant. Old Pope, however, did nothing of the kind,
but invested money in the French funds, his conscience not