ontact with the world of his day he stood utterly apart. He was
the son of a Catholic linen-draper, who had withdrawn from his business
in Lombard Street to a retirement on the skirts of Windsor Forest; and
there amidst the stormy years which followed William's accession the boy
grew up in an atmosphere of poetry, buried in the study of the older
English singers, stealing to London for a peep at Dryden in his
arm-chair at Will's, himself already lisping in numbers, and busy with
an epic at the age of twelve. Pope's latter years were as secluded as
his youth. His life, as Johnson says, was "a long disease"; his puny
frame, his crooked figure, the feebleness of his health, his keen
sensitiveness to pain, whether of mind or body, cut him off from the
larger world of men, and doomed him to the faults of a morbid
temperament. To the last he remained vain, selfish, affected; he loved
small intrigues and petty lying; he was incredibly jealous and touchy;
he dwelt on the fouler aspect of things with an unhealthy pruriency; he
stung right and left with a malignant venom. But nobler qualities rose
out of this morbid undergrowth of faults. If Pope was quickly moved to
anger, he was as quickly moved to tears; though every literary gnat
could sting him to passion, he could never read the lament of Priam over
Hector without weeping. His sympathies lay indeed within a narrow range,
but within that range they were vivid and intense; he clung passionately
to the few he loved; he took their cause for his own; he flung himself
almost blindly into their enthusiasms and their hates. But loyal as he
was to his friends, he was yet more loyal to his verse. His vanity never
led him to literary self-sufficiency; no artist ever showed a truer
lowliness before the ideal of his art; no poet ever corrected so much,
or so invariably bettered his work by each correction. One of his finest
characteristics, indeed, was his high sense of literary dignity. From
the first he carried on the work of Dryden by claiming a worth and
independence for literature; and he broke with disdain through the
traditions of patronage which had degraded men of letters into
hangers-on of the great.

[Sidenote: The Dunciad.]

With aims and conceptions such as these, Pope looked bitterly out on the
phase of transition through which English letters were passing. As yet
his poetic works had shown little of the keen and ardent temper that lay
within him. The promise of his sprin