Every evening on his return home the "marvellous boy" committed to paper the results of his communing with the Muses in the leafy grove. In this way he composed and wrote out many juvenile verses, amongst others an epic poem of more than four thousand lines, which in after years his matured taste consigned to the flames. So close an application, combined with complete isolation from all companionship of children of his own age, was certain in the end to affect disastrously his mental constitution as well as his bodily health. Accordingly we find that he never shook off the morbid self-consciousness which his solitary childhood had developed in him. And there is no doubt that his singular propensity to tricks and plots, which increased upon him with increasing age, even to the end of his life, was fostered by the atmosphere of evasion and deceit, in which, owing to the severe penal laws against Papists, he was necessarily brought up, and which in his case was never corrected by the wholesome training, if rough experience of a public school. At the same time his intense application, untempered by any distraction of games or amusements, produced its natural results in a constitution by nature weakly, and began by the time he was sixteen years of age seriously to affect his health. He tried many physicians to no purpose, and finding himself daily growing worse thought he had not long to live. He therefore calmly sat down and wrote to take leave of all his friends. Amongst others he sent a last farewell to the Abbé Southcote, who lived near Abingdon. The Abbé, thinking that Pope's malady was mental rather than physical, went to his friend Dr. Radcliffe, the famous physician of Oxford, and described to him the boy's condition. Armed with full directions the Abbé hastened to Binfield, to enforce with all the ardour of friendship the doctors chief prescriptions--strict diet, less study and a daily ride in the open air. In this way Pope, while riding in the Forest, began first to meet, then to know, and finally to be intimate with the squire of the neighbouring village. Easthampstead Park was at this time occupied by the veteran statesman, Sir William Trumbull, Knt. He had lived abroad for many years as ambassador, first at Paris and then at Constantinople. On his return home he had been appointed Secretary of State to William III., and now quite recently, in 1697, he had resigned all his appointments and had retired to end his days peacefully at home.