Alexander Pope | Page 3

family tradition represents him as a
sweet-tempered child, and says that he was called the "little
nightingale," from the beauty of his voice. As the sickly, solitary, and
precocious infant of elderly parents, we may guess that he was not a
little spoilt, if only in the technical sense.
The religion of the family made their seclusion from the world the
more rigid, and by consequence must have strengthened their mutual
adhesiveness. Catholics were then harassed by a legislation which
would be condemned by any modern standard as intolerably tyrannical.
Whatever apology may be urged for the legislators on the score of
contemporary prejudices or special circumstances, their best excuse is
that their laws were rather intended to satisfy constituents, and to
supply a potential means of defence, than to be carried into actual
execution. It does not appear that the Popes had to fear any active
molestation in the quiet observance of their religious duties. Yet a
Catholic was not only a member of a hated minority, regarded by the
rest of his countrymen as representing the evil principle in politics and
religion, but was rigorously excluded from a public career, and from
every position of honour or authority. In times of excitement the
severer laws might be put in force. The public exercise of the Catholic
religion was forbidden, and to be a Catholic was to be predisposed to
the various Jacobite intrigues which still had many chances in their
favour. When the pretender was expected in 1744, a proclamation, to
which Pope thought it decent to pay obedience, forbade the appearance
of Catholics within ten miles of London; and in 1730 we find him

making interest on behalf of a nephew, who had been prevented from
becoming an attorney because the judges were rigidly enforcing the
oaths of supremacy and allegiance.
Catholics had to pay double taxes and were prohibited from acquiring
real property. The elder Pope, according to a certainly inaccurate story,
had a conscientious objection to investing his money in the funds of a
Protestant government, and, therefore, having converted his capital into
coin, put it in a strong-box, and took it out as he wanted it. The old
merchant was not quite so helpless, for we know that he had
investments in the French rentes, besides other sources of income; but
the story probably reflects the fact that his religious disqualifications
hampered even his financial position.
Pope's character was affected in many ways by the fact of his belonging
to a sect thus harassed and restrained. Persecution, like bodily infirmity,
has an ambiguous influence. If it sometimes generates in its victims a
heroic hatred of oppression, it sometimes predisposes them to the use
of the weapons of intrigue and falsehood, by which the weak evade the
tyranny of the strong. If under that discipline Pope learnt to love
toleration, he was not untouched by the more demoralizing influences
of a life passed in an atmosphere of incessant plotting and evasion. A
more direct consequence was his exclusion from the ordinary schools.
The spirit of the rickety lad might have been broken by the rough
training of Eton or Westminster in those days; as, on the other hand, he
might have profited by acquiring a livelier perception of the meaning of
that virtue of fair-play, the appreciation of which is held to be a set-off
against the brutalizing influences of our system of public education. As
it was, Pope was condemned to a desultory education. He picked up
some rudiments of learning from the family priest; he was sent to a
school at Twyford, where he is said to have got into trouble for writing
a lampoon upon his master; he went for a short time to another in
London, where he gave a more creditable if less characteristic proof of
his poetical precocity. Like other lads of genius, he put together a kind
of play--a combination, it seems, of the speeches in Ogilby's Iliad--and
got it acted by his schoolfellows. These brief snatches of schooling,
however, counted for little. Pope settled at home at the early age of

twelve, and plunged into the delights of miscellaneous reading with the
ardour of precocious talent. He read so eagerly that his feeble
constitution threatened to break down, and when about seventeen, he
despaired of recovery, and wrote a farewell to his friends. One of them,
an Abbé Southcote, applied for advice to the celebrated Dr. Radcliffe,
who judiciously prescribed idleness and exercise. Pope soon recovered,
and, it is pleasant to add, showed his gratitude long afterwards by
obtaining for Southcote, through Sir Robert Walpole, a desirable piece
of French preferment. Self-guided studies have their advantages, as
Pope himself observed, but they do not lead a youth through the dry
places of literature, or stimulate him to severe intellectual