Gay's pardon for some offense of which Gay knew not. We regret that Pope and Steele could not also have been summoned to that bedside, not only to receive his forgiveness, but also to hear his last remark to his dissolute stepson, the Earl of Warwick, "See how a Christian can die." Pope would probably have gone off and written a satire on the words; and one does feel that Addison was exasperatingly sure of himself even in death: his unbroken successes, even his immortality, came as easily to him as eating his dinner. At bottom, however, he was a great and good man; his faults grow very little in the light of his learning, his refinement, his sanity, his genuineness, and his generosity. He was above party strife. He was the ablest prose writer of his time; he stands, in fact, preëminent with two or three others in the whole history of English literature. Among the intellects of the day he had only one peer - Swift. Above all, he "reconciled wit and virtue," one of the most important contributions to morality in the eighteenth century.

ALEXANDER POPE

POPE held a unique position in the age of Queen Anne. Most of the great writers at that time depended for their eminence as much on the favor of Church or State as on their literary merits. Addison, for instance, was Secretary for Ireland and later Secretary of State; Swift was as much the Dean of St. Patrick's as the author of Gulliver; Steele was a member of Parliament, Prior was an ambassador, and Gay depended on a patron. Much of this favor, it is true, was the reward of literary excellence; the success and the preferment, however, went hand-in-hand. Pope, on the other hand, in the face of physical deformities and religious ostracism, fought his way purely by his pen to the first place among contemporary poets. He perfected the heroic couplet, and he gave serious dignity to letters as a calling. So great was he, in fact, that poets unquestioningly made him their model for a half century; his influence extended into the very heart of the reaction against him and his school. His life will be found interesting as it touches the lives of his great contemporaries, as it develops a character that was a strange mixture of petty vanities and high purpose, of bitter jealousy and genuine tenderheartedness; but it must be chiefly kept in mind that Pope was, from the age of twelve to his grave, peculiarly, professionally a man of letters.

Alexander Pope was born of Roman Catholic parents on May 21, 1688, in Lombard Street, London. His father, of the same Christian name, acquired as a linen

merchant a fortune sufficiently great to enable him to retire, when Pope was still a small child, to Binfield, on the border of Windsor Forest. His mother, whose maiden name was Edith Turner, of good Yorkshire stock, lived to the great age of ninety-three. The lasting affection of the son for his mother is a refreshing contrast to the quarrels and petty deceits that checkered his whole life.

Two things withheld from Pope the education common to English boys. The "glorious Revolution" of 1688, in the first place, brought Catholics into disfavor, frequently into persecution. Besides this, Pope was deformed. It was only by patient nursing and constant attendance throughout his life that soul and bodyhis "crazy carcase," as Wycherley called it were kept together. He did attend three schools, between the ages of eight and twelve, but most of his schooling came through the help of a family priest and his own eagerness to learn. He himself told Spence that he had taught himself "Latin, as well as French and Greek." The result was a very defective scholarship, but a useful familiarity with Homer, Virgil, Statius, Horace, and Ovid.

Pope has been considered, largely on his own suspicious testimony, one of the great examples of poetic precocity. On his own authority he versified almost from the cradle. Adopting the phrase from Ovid, he said:

"As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,

I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came." He submitted his verses for correction to his father, who, when not satisfied, returned them with the comment, "These are not good rhymes." But the young