Out by Binfield he happened upon good friends. {34} Among others a Blount family to which belonged two daughters Blount--sympathetic companions to him then and long afterward; scores of letters, too, there were, to which now Teresa Blount and now Miss Patty Blount were parties: He seeming in those romantic days (upon the edge of Windsor Forest) sometimes in love with one and sometimes the other; and they, in this mixing of letters getting probably as confused as he, and a great deal more vexed; and so came coldness and short-lived quarrelling, making one thing pretty sure--that when a young man or woman begins to play with the different tenses of the verb "I love," a single correspondent is much better than two. However, his friendship with Miss Patty Blount lasted his life out. An old baronet of the neighborhood, who had been diplomat in James I.'s day, took a fancy to this keen-thoughted lad and made a companion of him. He came to know old Wycherly too, and scores of men about town; even Jacob Tonson, the famous publisher of those times, had written to Pope before he was twenty, asking the privilege of printing certain pastorals of his writing, which {35} had been handed about in the clubs; and thought them--what they really were--astonishing for their literary finish. _His Poetic Methods._ [Sidenote: Poetry of Pope.] But young Mr. Pope does not think much of the pastorals, save as stepping-stones; they paved his way to a large acquaintance with the London wits; and it would seem that at one time he thought of living at the dreadful pace of these gentlemen--in bottles and midnight routs; perhaps he tried it for a while; but his feeble frame could stand no such neck-breaking gallop. He can, however, put more of wearisome elaboration and pains-taking skill to his rhymes than any of the verse-makers of his time. He has by nature a mincing step of his own--different as possible from the long, easy lope of Dryden--and that step he perfects by unwearied practice, and word-mongering, until it comes to the wondrous ten-syllabled movement, which for polish, and rhythmic tric-trac is unmatchable. The _Essay on Criticism_, _Windsor Forest_, and {36} the _Rape of the Lock_, all belonged to those early years at Binfield, and I give a test of each; first, from the _Essay_:-- "Where'er you find 'the cooling Western breeze,' In the next line, it 'whispers through the trees:' If crystal streams 'with pleasing murmurs creep,' The reader's threatened (not in vain) with 'sleep;' Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along." Next this bustling bit, from _Windsor Forest_:--