Wood appears not to have known, any more than his informant Aubrey, that Alexander was the name of Pope, the father-in-law (which here means stepfather) of Wilkins; and neither has Dr. Walter Pope, Aubrey, or Anthony Wood, told us anything about him. The question is, Was _this_ Alexander Pope, of Dr. Barcroft's will, the Alexander Pope who died rector of Thruxton? Was he the father of the rector, or was there, in 1627, two Alexander Popes, both clergymen connected with Oxford, but not nearly connected with each other? A little further light, which possibly the records of the University of Oxford might supply, may enable some one to dispose of these questions. All I at present venture to say is, that the probabilities seem to incline in favour of the supposition that the Alexander Pope who was instituted to the rectory of Thruxton in 1631, is the Alexander Pope named in Dr. Barcroft's will in 1627, and consequently the Alexander Pope who married the widow of Walter Wilkins. But then I should propose a further conjecture (in questions such as these we must allow conjectures, and bear to hear of probabilities), that there was a second marriage of the Rector of Thruxton, of which the Poet's father was the issue, and that Dr. Walter Pope, the poet and miscellaneous writer, was the offspring of the first marriage. Yet I state this dubiously; and, considering how much we know of Dr. Walter Pope and of Bishop Wilkins, find it difficult to reconcile the want of any trace of family connection between them and the Poet, with the supposition that Dr. Walter Pope was half-brother to the London merchant. Perhaps, after all, there were two Alexanders connected with Oxford, and Dr. Walter Pope, the child of the one, father or uncle of the Hampshire clergyman. It is to be regretted that more has not been preserved of what Mr. Potenger could have told of the Popes, from recollections of the conversations of the maiden aunt, who must have been sister to the Rector of Thruxton; and as she stood, as he informs us, in the same degree of relationship to Pope and to himself, it would follow that the father or mother of Mr. Potenger was issue of another sister or brother of the Rector of Thruxton. This affords hints as to the course which further inquiry should take; but I cannot pass by the indication which this fact affords of the respectability of the Poet's paternal ancestry: the Potengers of Hampshire and Dorsetshire being descendants of Dr. John Potenger, the celebrated headmaster of the Winchester College School, whose son John Potenger, born in 1647, was Comptroller of the Pipe.[2]