Pope, who was born in London, spent nearly the whole of his life between Binfield, in Windsor Forest, and Twickenham. They were his only two constant residences; the time which he passed in London, he passed but as a visitor, or lodger. Town poet, or poet of society, as he seems, he was inseparably attached to the country, though it was the country of an easily accessible vicinity to town, and itself pretty thickly inhabited by people of rank and intelligence. From the time that his father purchased the property at Binfield, with the exception of a short time at school at Twyford, near Winchester, and at another school in Mary-le-bone, which was removed while he was there to near Hyde Park Corner, Pope never quitted Binfield as a residence till he bought Twickenham. He went soon after his twelfth year from school, and he continued to reside at Binfield till 1716, when he was twenty-eight years of age; and singularly enough, he lived at Twickenham twenty-eight years more, dying in May 1744, at the age of fifty-six. As is the case of many other people, who, with all their philosophy, are not content to rest their claims to distinction on their own virtues and achievements, there was an attempt on the part of Pope to hang his family on an aristocratic peg; and, as was to be expected in the case of a man who did not spare his enemies and who wrote Dunciads, there was as stout an attempt to pull this peg out. In his epistle to Dr. Arburthnot, he makes this claim for his parentage: "Of gentle blood, part shed in honor's cause, While yet in Britain honor had applause, Each parent sprang," And in a note to that epistle we are further informed, "that Mr. Pope's father was a gentleman of family in Oxfordshire, the head of which was the Earl of Downe, whose sole heiress married the Earl of Lindsay. His mother was the daughter of William Turner, of York," &c. In reply to this, Warton tells us, that when Pope published this note, a relation of his own, a Mr. Pottinger, observed that his cousin, Pope, had made himself out a fine pedigree, but he wondered where he got it; that he had never heard any thing himself of their being related to the Earls of Downe; and, what was more, he had an old maiden aunt, equally related, a great genealogist, who was always talking of her family, but never mentioned this circumstance, on which she certainly would not have been silent had she known any thing of it. That the Earl of Guildford had examined the pedigree and descents of the Downe family for any such relationship; and that at the Heralds' Office, this pedigree, which Pope had made out for himself, was considered to be as much fabricated as Mr. Ireland's descent from Shakspeare.