ly known as
the contributor of some small poems to a Miscellany. Three years
afterwards (1713) he was receiving such patronage in his great
undertaking, the translation of Homer, as to prove conclusively that he
was regarded by the leaders of literature as a poet of very high
promise; and two years later (1715) the appearance of the first volume
of his translation entitled him to rank as the first poet of the day. So
rapid a rise to fame has had few parallels, and was certainly not
approached until Byron woke and found himself famous at twenty-four.
Pope was eager for the praise of remarkable precocity, and was weak and
insincere enough to alter the dates of some of his writings in order to
strengthen his claim. Yet, even when we accept the corrected accounts of
recent enquirers, there is no doubt that he gave proofs at a very early
age of an extraordinary command of the resources of his art. It is still
more evident that his merits were promptly and frankly recognized by his
contemporaries. Great men and distinguished authors held out friendly
hands to him; and he never had to undergo, even for a brief period, the
dreary ordeal of neglect through which men of loftier but less popular
genius, have been so often compelled to pass. And yet it unfortunately
happened that, even in this early time, when success followed success,
and the young man's irritable nerves might well have been soothed by the
general chorus of admiration he excited and returned bitter antipathies,
some of which lasted through his life.

Pope's works belong to three distinct periods. The translation of Homer
was the great work of the middle period of his life. In his later years
he wrote the moral and satirical poems by which he is now best known.
The earlier period, with which I have now to deal, was one of
experimental excursions into various fields of poetry, with varying
success and rather uncertain aim. Pope had already, as we have seen,
gone through the process of "filling his basket." He had written the
epic poem which happily found its way into the flames. He had translated
many passages that struck his fancy in the classics, especially
considerable fragments of Ovid and Statius. Following Dryden, he had
turned some of Chaucer into modern English; and, adopting a fashion
which had not as yet quite died of inanition, he had composed certain
pastorals in the manner of Theocritus and Virgil. These early
productions had been written under the eye