te
literary letters, being even decoyed into patching and revising the
old beau's senile verses. Another of his correspondents was Henry
Cromwell--Gay's "honest, hatless Cromwell, with red breeches," who at
this time was playing the part of an elderly Phaon to the Sappho of a
third-rate poetess, Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas. The epistles of the boy at
Binfield to these battered men about town, when not discussing metres
and the precepts of M. the Abbe Bossu, in a style modelled upon Balzac
and Voiture, are sometimes sorry reading. But both Wycherley and
Cromwell were wits and men of education, and it is not difficult to
pardon that morbid, over-active mind for occasional vagrancy in its
efforts after some congenial escape from the Tory fox-hunters of
Berkshire and the ribald drinking songs of Durfey.

By 1711, when Pope was three-and-twenty, his intercourse with
Wycherley and Cromwell had practically ceased, and "knowing Walsh" was
dead. But he had already obtained a hearing as a poet. He had written
a series of "Pastorals" in the reigning taste, a taste which, under
guise of imitating Theocritus and Virgil, not only transferred to our
bleaker shores the fauna and flora of Italy and Greece, but brought
along with them the light-clad (and somewhat embarrassed) Delias and
Sylvias of those sunnier lands. Pope, indeed, partly modified this. He
drew the line at wolves, for instance, though (as Mr. Leslie Stephen
suggests) this mattered little when altars and milk-white sacrificial
bulls were still "perpetually retained." But the main feature of the
"Pastorals" was less their subject than their versification, which in
these earliest efforts was already as finished and as artful as
anything Pope ever wrote, and was far above the work of his
contemporaries. Lansdowne ("Granville the polite"), Congreve, Garth,
Halifax, and others praised them warmly in MS., and left-legged Jacob
Tonson came cap in hand to solicit them for the sixth part of his
"Miscellany," where they ultimately wound up that volume, balancing
(or rather over-balancing) the "Pastorals" of Ambrose Philips, which
began it. To the same collection Pope contributed an imitation of
Chaucer, and an episode from the "Iliad." The immediate success of
these performances seems to have set him upon his next poem, the
"Essay on Criticism," which was published by Lewis in 1711. His
mastery over his medium was still more noticeable than the originality
of his thought. But this _cent