injured his feeble health, and made him the lifelong sufferer he was. It was a noble zeal, and arose from the immense interest Pope ever took in human things. From 1700 to 1715, that is, from his fourteenth to his twenty-ninth year, he lived with his father and mother at Binfield, on the borders of Windsor Forest, which he made the subject of one of his early poems, against which it was alleged, with surely some force, that it has nothing distinctive about it, and might as easily have been written about any other forest; to which, however, Dr. Johnson characteristically replied that the _onus_ lay upon the critic of first proving that there is anything distinctive about Windsor Forest, which personally he doubted, one green field in the Doctor's opinion being just like another. In 1715 Pope moved with his parents to Chiswick, where, in 1717, his father, aged seventy-five, died. The following year the poet again moved with his mother to the celebrated villa at Twickenham, where in 1733 she died, in her ninety-third year. Ten years later Pope's long disease, his life, came to its appointed end. His poetical dates may be briefly summarized thus: his _Pastorals_, 1709; the _Essay on Criticism_, 1711; the first version of the _Rape of the Lock_, 1712; the second, 1714; the _Iliad_, begun in 1715, was finished 1720; _Eloisa_, 1717; the _Elegy_ to the memory of an _Unfortunate Lady_ and the _Dunciad_, 1728; the _Essay on Man_, 1732; and then the _Epistles_ and _Satires_. Of all Pope's biographers, Dr. Johnson is still, and will probably ever remain, the best. The _Life_, indeed, like the rest of the _Lives of the Poets_, is a lazy performance. It is not the strenuous work of a young author eager for fame. When Johnson sat down, at the instance of the London booksellers, to write the lives of those poets whose works his employers thought it well to publish, he had long been an author at grass, and had no mind whatever again to wear the collar. He had great reading and an amazing memory, and those were at the service of the trade. The facts he knew, or which were brought to his door, he recorded, but research was not in his way. Was he not already endowed--with a pension, which, with his customary indifference to attack, he wished were twice as large, in order that his enemies might make twice as much fuss over it? None the less--nay, perhaps all the more--for being written with so little effort, the _Lives of the Poets_ are delightful reading, and Pope's is one of the very best of them. {59} None knew the infirmities of ordinary human nature better than Johnson. They neither angered him nor amused him; he neither storms, sneers, nor chuckles, as he records man's vanity, insincerity, jealousy, and pretence. It is with a placid pen he pricks the bubble fame, dishonours the overdrawn sentiment, burlesques the sham philosophy of life; but for generosity, friendliness, affection, he is