et edition of the bard in the original.
Latin he could probably read with decent comfort, though it is noticeable
that if he had occasion to refer to a Latin book, and there was a French
translation, he preferred the latter version to the original. Voltaire,
who knew Pope, asserts that he could not speak a word of French, and
could hardly read it; but Voltaire was not a truthful man, and on one
occasion told lies in an affidavit. The fact is, Pope's curiosity was
too inordinate--his desire to know everything all at once too strong--to
admit of the delay of learning a foreign language; and he was
consequently a reader of translations, and he lived in an age of
translations. He was, as a boy, a simply ferocious reader, and was early
acquainted with the contents of the great poets, both of antiquity and
the modern world. His studies, at once intense, prolonged, and exciting,
injured his feeble health, and made him the lifelong sufferer he was. It
was a noble zeal, and arose from the immense interest Pope ever took in
human things.

From 1700 to 1715, that is, from his fourteenth to his twenty-ninth year,
he lived with his father and mother at Binfield, on the borders of
Windsor Forest, which he made the subject of one of his early poems,
against which it was alleged, with surely some force, that it has nothing
distinctive about it, and might as easily have been written about any
other forest; to which, however, Dr. Johnson characteristically replied
that the _onus_ lay upon the critic of first proving that there is
anything distinctive about Windsor Forest, which personally he doubted,
one green field in the Doctor's opinion being just like another. In 1715
Pope moved with his parents to Chiswick, where, in 1717, his father, aged
seventy-five, died. The following year the poet again moved with his
mother to the celebrated villa at Twickenham, where in 1733 she died, in
her ninety-third year. Ten years later Pope's long disease, his life,
came to its appointed end. His poetical dates may be briefly summarized
thus: his _Pastorals_, 1709; the _Essay on Criticism_, 1711; the first
version of the _Rape of the Lock_, 1712; the second, 1714; the _Iliad_,
begun in 1715, was finished 1720; _Eloisa_, 1717; the _Elegy_ to the
memory of an _Unfortunate Lady_ and the _Dunciad_, 1728; the _Essay on
Man_, 1732; and then the _Epistles_ and _Satires_. Of all Pope's
biographers, Dr. Johnson is still, and will probably ever remain,