ool, where he learned but little. As a boy, however, he had tried
his hand at translating, and had tacked together, from reminiscences
of Ogilby, a kind of Homeric drama to be acted by his playmates, with
the gardener for Ajax. But his real education began at Binfield,
where, when between twelve and thirteen, he resolutely sat down to
teach himself Latin, French, and Greek. Between twelve and twenty he
must have read enormously and written as indefatigably. Among other
things, he composed an epic of Alexander, Prince of Rhodes, which is
said to have extended to four thousand lines, and its versification
was so finished that he used some of the couplets long afterward for
maturer work. His earliest critic was his father, who would sit in
judgment on his son's performances, ruthlessly "sending him down" when
the Muse proved unusually stubborn, "These be good rhymes," he would
say when he was pleased.

The quiet, orderly household in Windsor Forest received but few
visitors, and those chiefly of the family faith. Such, for example,
were the Carylls of West Grinstead, and the Blounts of Mapledurham,
where there were two bright-eyed daughters of Pope's own age, the
"fair-hair'd Martha and Teresa brown," whose names, linked in Gay's
dancing-verse, were afterward to be indissolubly connected with that
of their Binfield neighbor. At this date, however, they must have been
school-girls at Hammersmith, under some pre-Thackerayan Miss
Pinkerton, or else were being "finished" at that Paris establishment
whence they derived the foreign _cachet_ which is said to have been
part of their charm. Another friend was the ex-statesman and
ambassador, Sir William Trumbull of East Hampstead, who compared
artichokes with the father and read poetry with the son. To Trumbull
Pope submitted some of his earliest verses, and from him, it seems,
received much valuable advice, including a recommendation to translate
Homer. Another acquaintance was the minor poet and criticaster,
William Walsh, who gave his young friend that memorable (and somewhat
ambiguous) injunction to "study the ancients" and "be correct." He had
been introduced to Walsh by another man of letters, whose acquaintance
he must have made during one of his brief excursions to London, the
whilom dramatist Wycherley--now a broken septuagenarian, but still
retaining a sort of bankrupt _bel air_. To Wycherley, who could not
tear himself from his favorite St. James's, the youthful Pope wro