ch _rentes_, besides other sources of income; but
the story probably reflects the fact that his religious
disqualifications hampered even his financial position.

Pope's character was affected in many ways by the fact of his belonging
to a sect thus harassed and restrained. Persecution, like bodily
infirmity, has an ambiguous influence. If it sometimes generates in its
victims a heroic hatred of oppression, it sometimes predisposes them to
the use of the weapons of intrigue and falsehood, by which the weak
evade the tyranny of the strong. If under that discipline Pope learnt to
love toleration, he was not untouched by the more demoralizing
influences of a life passed in an atmosphere of incessant plotting and
evasion. A more direct consequence was his exclusion from the ordinary
schools. The spirit of the rickety lad might have been broken by the
rough training of Eton or Westminster in those days; as, on the other
hand, he might have profited by acquiring a livelier perception of the
meaning of that virtue of fair-play, the appreciation of which is held
to be a set-off against the brutalizing influences of our system of
public education. As it was, Pope was condemned to a desultory
education. He picked up some rudiments of learning from the family
priest; he was sent to a school at Twyford, where he is said to have got
into trouble for writing a lampoon upon his master; he went for a short
time to another in London, where he gave a more creditable if less
characteristic proof of his poetical precocity. Like other lads of
genius, he put together a kind of play--a combination, it seems, of the
speeches in Ogilby's Iliad--and got it acted by his schoolfellows. These
brief snatches of schooling, however, counted for little. Pope settled
at home at the early age of twelve, and plunged into the delights of
miscellaneous reading with the ardour of precocious talent. He read so
eagerly that his feeble constitution threatened to break down, and when
about seventeen, he despaired of recovery, and wrote a farewell to his
friends. One of them, an Abbe Southcote, applied for advice to the
celebrated Dr. Radcliffe, who judiciously prescribed idleness and
exercise. Pope soon recovered, and, it is pleasant to add, showed his
gratitude long afterwards by obtaining for Southcote, through Sir Robert
Walpole, a desirable piece of French preferment. Self-guided studies
have their advantages, as Pope himself observed, but they do not lead a