[Illustration: ALEXANDER POPE. _From the portrait by William Hoare_.] Life.--Alexander Pope was born in London in 1688. His father, a devout Catholic, was a linen merchant, who gave his son little formal schooling, but allowed him to pick up his education by reading such authors as pleased his fancy. He was a very precocious child. At the age of twelve he was writing an _Ode on Solitude_. He chose his vocation early, for writing poetry was the business of his life. In his childhood, his parents removed from London to Binfield, a village in Berkshire, nine miles from Windsor. When he was nearly thirty years old, his translation of the _Iliad_ enabled him to buy a house and grounds at Twickenham on the Thames, about twelve miles above London. He lived here for the rest of his life, indulging his taste for landscape gardening and entertaining the greatest men of the age. After early middle life, his writings made him pecuniarily independent, but he suffered much from ill health. In his _Lives of the English Poets_, Dr. Samuel Johnson says of Pope:-- "By natural deformity, or accidental distortion, his vital functions were so much disordered that his life was a long disease... When he rose, he was invested in a bodice made of stiff canvas, being scarce able to hold himself erect till they were laced, and he then put on a flannel waistcoat. One side was contracted. His legs were so slender that he enlarged their bulk with three pair of stockings... "In all his intercourse with mankind, he had great delight in artifice, and endeavored to attain all his purposes by indirect and unsuspected methods. _He hardly drank tea without a stratagem._" The publication of his correspondence tangled him in a mesh of deceptions, because his desire to appear in a favorable light led him to change letters that he had sent to friends. His double-dealing, intense jealousy, and irritability, due to his physical condition, caused him to become involved in many quarrels, which gave him the opportunity to indulge to the utmost his own satiric tendency. In one of his late satires, _The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_, he charged Addison with the inclination to-- "Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer." On the basis of what he wrote, we may divide his life into three periods. During his first thirty years, he produced various kinds of verse, like the _Essay on Criticism_ and _The Rape of the Lock_. The middle period of his life was marked by his translation of Homer's _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. In his third period, he wrote moral and didactic poems, like the _Essay on Man_, and satires, like the _Dunciad_. [Illustration: POPE'S VILLA AT TWICKENHAM. _From an old print._]