The ideal biographer of Pope, if he ever appears, must be endowed with the qualities of an acute critic and a patient antiquarian; and it would take years of labour to work out all the minute problems connected with the subject. All that I can profess to have done is to have given a short summary of the obvious facts, and of the main conclusions established by the evidence given at length in the writings of Mr. Dilke and Mr. Elwin. I have added such criticisms as seemed desirable in a work of this kind, and I must beg pardon by anticipation if I have fallen into inaccuracies in relating a story so full of pitfalls for the unwary. L. S. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE EARLY YEARS 1 CHAPTER II. FIRST PERIOD OF POPE'S LITERARY CAREER 21 CHAPTER III. POPE'S HOMER 61 CHAPTER IV. POPE AT TWICKENHAM 81 CHAPTER V. THE WAR WITH THE DUNCES 111 CHAPTER VI. CORRESPONDENCE 137 CHAPTER VII. THE ESSAY ON MAN 159 CHAPTER VIII. EPISTLES AND SATIRES 181 CHAPTER IX. THE END 206 POPE. CHAPTER I. EARLY YEARS. The father of Alexander Pope was a London merchant, a devout Catholic, and not improbably a convert to Catholicism. His mother was one of seventeen children of William Turner, of York; one of her sisters was the wife of Cooper, the well-known portrait-painter. Mrs. Cooper was the poet's godmother; she died when he was five years old, leaving to her sister, Mrs. Pope, a "grinding-stone and muller," and their mother's "picture in limning;" and to her nephew, the little Alexander, all her "books, pictures, and medals set in gold or otherwise."