Produced by Brownfox and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.) POPE: HIS DESCENT AND FAMILY CONNECTIONS. FACTS AND CONJECTURES. BY JOSEPH HUNTER. ANCESTRY, whose grace Chalks successors their way, SHAKESPEARE. LONDON: JOHN RUSSELL SMITH, 36, SOHO SQUARE. M.DCCC.LVII. LONDON: F. PICKTON, PRINTER, PERRY'S PLACE, 29, OXFORD STREET. The following Tract is an enlargement of the principal portion of an account which I propose to give of POPE, in _Poets and Verse Writers, from Chaucer to Pope: new Facts in their History_--should the public curiosity respecting them call for the publication of what I have collected and written. OCTOBER 26, 1857. POPE: HIS DESCENT AND FAMILY CONNECTIONS. Two persons of noble birth, who thought themselves insulted in the "Imitation of the First of the Second Book of the Satires of Horace," retorted upon the Poet with a severity not wholly undeserved. Unlike Pope, who had dismissed them both in a line or two, they composed their attacks very elaborately, seeking out everything that could offend him,--defects for which he must be held responsible, and those for which no man can justly be so held. One of these latter points was, want of _birth_. The lines, Whilst none thy crabbed numbers can endure, Hard as thy heart, and _as thy birth obscure_, are attributed to the Lady Mary Wortley Montague; but Johnson assigns them to Lord Hervey,[1] who attacked Pope in another poem, in which he makes it a charge that he was a hatter's son, and insults him on the score of the meanness of his family. These allusions to his origin seem to have galled the Poet more than anything else that was said of him. He was then living in what is called high society, and it was of some importance to him not to be thought meanly bred. Three courses were open to him. He might have assumed to pass over the charge as unworthy his notice: he might have claimed it as a merit to have surpassed his ancestors, and risen to distinction by his own genius, "out of himself drawing his web;" or he might deny the charge altogether. He adopted the last of these courses, and in this he acted wisely and honestly.