This, however, is of value. It shows us that he held not his living long, about fourteen years; that he probably died in middle life; and that his son Alexander, the merchant, could have been no more than a very young child when he lost his parent. It does not show us that he was actually a posthumous child; but then there is a possibility that the inscription on his monument, which is expressed in too general terms, may not be strictly correct in setting forth his age at the time of his death. However, the difference is not great between his being literally a posthumous child, and an infant of two or three years old when he lost his father. But it may be asked, since Pope must have known perfectly well the name and highly respectable position in life of his grandfather, why he did not come boldly forward and claim to be descended of a clergyman born in the reign of Elizabeth, and dying in the prime of life, when occupying so good a position? It would have been a more sufficient answer to the taunt of obscure birth, and have shown to the world his descent, if not from a great, yet from a cultivated, ancestry. It is, perhaps, idle to attempt to divine the cause, but it is no unreasonable conjecture that here his religious, or rather ecclesiastical, opinions came into play, and that he, a Roman Catholic, would not regard with the same satisfaction as others would, a descent from a Protestant clergyman, _a married priest_, nor would be over solicitous that others should know, on his authority, that his father was the offspring of such an unhallowed union--that is, as he would esteem it. But what if it should turn out that this clergyman was not only a Protestant minister possessed of considerable preferment, but that he also belonged to that section of the Church of England which was the most remote from the Church of Rome, and which held it in especial abhorrence? That he was either the son-in-law or the grandson of one who is always placed in the first rank of the Puritan ministers of the reign of Elizabeth, the noted and long-lived John Dodd, of Fawsley, in Northamptonshire? I shall first state a few well-established matters of fact, and then the probable inferences to be drawn from them. I refer, first, to the will of Robert Barcroft, of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, D.D., made on the 29th of April, 1627. He gives "to his godson, John Wilkins, Zanchi's Works, so many as I have, to be delivered to his father-in-law, Mr. Alexander Pope, for his use." Wilkins was then a boy; and Wood informs us (_Ath. Oxon._ ii. 105) that he was the son of a Walter Wilkins, a goldsmith of Oxford, and that his mother was one of the daughters of Dodd of Fawsley, where Wilkins was born. Further, that Wilkins was uterine brother to Dr. Walter Pope, who, in his _Life of Bishop Seth Ward_, speaks of this relationship. Wilkins was the Bishop of Chester of that name, and one of the founders of the Royal Society.