ALEXANDER POPE

(1688-1744)

BY THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY

LEXANDER POPE, the foremost English poet of the eighteenth century, was born in Lombard Street, London, on May 21st, 1688, and died at Twickenham, May 30th, 1744.

In our literature he is the earliest man of letters pure and simple. With that pursuit previous writers had mingled other avocations, if indeed literature itself had not been with them an avocation amid the distraction of other pursuits. Chaucer was a soldier and a diplomatist. Spenser was a government official. Shakespeare was an actor, besides being connected with the management of the company of which he was a member. Milton was an eager and earnest participant in the fierce religious and political strife of his time. Even Dryden held a position in the civil service. But Pope was never anything else than a man of letters. That career he had chosen from the first; and to it he remained faithful to the last.

It was mainly due to choice; partly it was a result of necessity. He was the son of a linen-draper who was a Roman Catholic; and Pope, though almost a latitudinarian in matters of religion, stood stanchly to the end by the faith of his parents. His creed accordingly shut him out of all the posts of profit and sinecures with which it was then not uncommon to reward literary merit. Even had it been otherwise, it is not likely that he would have been turned aside from his choice by the attraction of any other pursuit. In his case the Muse cannot be said to have been ungrateful. To him in a most unusual sense poetry was its own exceeding great reward. It lifted him to a station such as no man of letters before his time had ever attained, and few have attained since, and this too in spite of obstacles that it might seem would have put an effectual bar in the way of success. A member of a proscribed religious body, with no advantages of birth and fortune, with every disadvantage of personal appearance, he raised himself by the sheer force of genius to a position of equality with the highest of the land. Unplaced, untitled, he became the companion and friend of nobles and ministers of State, without in a single instance sacrificing his personal selfrespect, or appearing even to his bitterest foes in the light of a dependent upon the favor of the great.