as warm a friendship
as an old man can offer to a young one. The dissolute Restoration
dramatist, Wycherley, was also his temporary companion. The old man, if
Pope's story be true, asked him to correct his poems, which are indeed
beyond correction, as the youthful critic appears to have hinted, and
the two parted company.

The _Pastorals_, written, according to Pope's assertion, at the age of
sixteen, were published in 1709, and won an amount of praise
incomprehensible in the present day. Mr. Leslie Stephen has happily
appraised their value in calling them 'mere school-boy exercises.' Not
thus, however, were they regarded by the poet, or by the critics of his
age, yet neither he nor they could have divined the rapid progress of
his fame, and that in about six years' time he would be regarded as the
greatest of living poets. The _Essay on Criticism_, written, it appears,
in 1709, was published two years later, and received the highest honour
a poem could then have. It was praised by Addison in the _Spectator_ as
'a very fine poem,' and 'a masterpiece in its kind.' The 'kind,'
suggested by the _Ars Poetica_ of Horace, and the _Art Poetique_ of
Boileau--translated with Dryden's help by Sir William Soame--suited the
current taste for criticism and argument in rhyme, which had led
Roscommon to write an _Essay on Translated Verse_, and Sheffield an
_Essay on Poetry_. The _Essay on Criticism_ is a marvellous production
for a young man who had scarcely passed his maturity when it was
published. To have written lines and couplets that live still in the
language and are on everyone's lips is an achievement of which any poet
might be proud, and there are at least twenty such lines or couplets in
the poem.

In 1713 _Windsor Forest_ appeared. Through the most susceptible years of
life the poet had lived in the country, but Nature and Pope were not
destined to become friends; he looked at her 'through the spectacles of
books' and his description of natural objects is invariably of the
conventional type. Although never a resident in London he was unable in
the exercise of his art to breathe any atmosphere save that of the town,
and might have said, in the words of Lessing to his friend Kleist, 'When
you go to the country I go to the coffee-house.'[11]

The use, or as it would be more correct to say the abuse, of classical
mythology in the description of rural scenes had the sanction of great
names, and Pope was not likely to reject