combatants. When at last the contest seemed to droop it was only to
begin again upon a new issue; and the lists shook beneath the inroad
of De Quincey and Macaulay. Was Pope a "correct" poet? The latter-day
reader, turning cautiously--it may be languidly--the records of that
ancient controversy, wonders a little at the dust and hubbub. If he
trusts to his first impression, he will, in all probability, be
content to waive discussion by claiming for Pope a considerably lower
place than for Shakespeare or for Milton; and upon the point of his
"correctness" will decide discreetly, in the spirit of the immortal
Captain Bunsby, that much depends upon the precise application of the
term. But let him have a care. The debate is an endless one, eternally
seductive, irrepressibly renascent, and hopelessly bound up with the
ineradicable oppositions of human nature. Sooner or later he will be
drawn into the conflict and cry his slogan with the rest. If, in the
ensuing pages, their writer seems to shun that time-honored
discussion, as well as some other notable difficulties of Pope's
biography, he does so mainly lest they should, in Bunyan's homespun
phrase,

"--prove _ad infinitum_ and eat out
The thing that he already is about,"

to wit, the recalling of Pope's work and story.

Pope's father was a London linen-merchant, who, according to Spence,
"dealt in Hollands wholesale." His mother was of good extraction,
being the daughter of one William Turner, of York. Both were Roman
Catholics, at a time when to be of that faith in England was to suffer
many social disabilities; and it was perhaps in consequence of these
that, about the time of the Revolution, the elder Pope bought a small
house at Binfield, on the skirts of Windsor Forest. Here he lived upon
his means and cultivated his garden, a taste which he transmitted to
his son, who, under the care of his mother and a nurse named Mary
Beach, grew from a sickly infant into a frail, large-eyed boy with a
sweet voice, an eager, precocious temperament, and an inordinate love
of books, from copying the type of which he first learned to write.
Like his father, he was slightly deformed, while from his mother he
derived a life-long tendency to headache. His early education was of a
most miscellaneous character. After some tuition from the family
priest, he passed to a school at Twyford, where he is said to have
been flogged for lampooning the master. Thence he went to a second
sch