youth through the dry places of literature, or stimulate him to severe
intellectual training. Pope seems to have made some hasty raids into
philosophy and theology; he dipped into Locke, and found him "insipid;"
he went through a collection of the controversial literature of the
reign of James II., which seems to have constituted the paternal
library, and was alternately Protestant and Catholic, according to the
last book which he had read. But it was upon poetry and pure literature
that he flung himself with a genuine appetite. He learnt languages to
get at the story, unless a translation offered an easier path, and
followed wherever fancy led "like a boy gathering flowers in the fields
and woods."

It is needless to say that he never became a scholar in the strict sense
of the term. Voltaire declared that he could hardly read or speak a
word of French; and his knowledge of Greek would have satisfied Bentley
as little as his French satisfied Voltaire. Yet he must have been fairly
conversant with the best known French literature of the time, and he
could probably stumble through Homer with the help of a crib and a guess
at the general meaning. He says himself that at this early period, he
went through all the best critics; all the French, English and Latin
poems of any name; "Homer and some of the greater Greek poets in the
original," and Tasso and Ariosto in translations.

Pope at any rate acquired a wide knowledge of English poetry. Waller,
Spenser, and Dryden were, he says, his great favourites in the order
named, till he was twelve. Like so many other poets, he took infinite
delight in the _Faery Queen_; but Dryden, the great poetical luminary of
his own day, naturally exercised a predominant influence upon his mind.
He declared that he had learnt versification wholly from Dryden's works,
and always mentioned his name with reverence. Many scattered remarks
reported by Spence, and the still more conclusive evidence of frequent
appropriation, show him to have been familiar with the poetry of the
preceding century, and with much that had gone out of fashion in his
time, to a degree in which he was probably excelled by none of his
successors, with the exception of Gray. Like Gray he contemplated at one
time the history of English poetry which was in some sense executed by
Warton. It is characteristic, too, that he early showed a critical
spirit. From a boy, he says, he could distinguish between sweetness and
softness