We may, therefore, be said to receive very little more on this subject from the Poet's contemporaries than what he himself on the one side, and his enemies on the other, chose to communicate. It is quite insufficient for forming a right judgment on the question. There is very little fact, no proof, and no detail. If the point was worth raising at all, it was worth settling: besides that, the curiosity of later times craves more than this, when intent on studying the lives of England's greatest worthies. Dr. Johnson is content to dismiss the subject thus:--"This, and this only, is told by Pope, who is more willing, as I have heard it observed, to show what his father was not, than what he was." But Johnson lived in a century when there was little desire of minute and exact information respecting even the most eminent of our countrymen; and in writing of Pope as of Milton, he has certainly kept himself free from the temptation which besets all biographers, of becoming enamoured of those of whom they write. The spirit of research, however, was not entirely dormant even in that century. Editors and biographers did look around for anything that would easily present itself: nor can what they observed be said to have been wholly unimportant, for they brought to light one piece of evidence which deserves to be received with the same confidence which the testimony of Pope himself receives at our hands. This comes from a certain Mr. Potenger, who called himself a cousin of Pope. He gave the information to Dr. Bolton, who was Dean of Carlisle, who communicated it to Dr. Joseph Warton, from whom we receive it. His information was to this effect:--That the Poet's grandfather was a clergyman in Hampshire: that the Poet's father was the younger of two sons, and was sent to Lisbon to be placed in a mercantile house: that there he left the Church of England and became a Roman Catholic: that he knew nothing of the "fine pedigree" which his cousin Pope set up, and that as to a descent from the Earls of Downe, he was confident no such descent could be proved, for if it had been so, he must have heard of it from a maiden aunt, who stood in the same degree of relationship to Pope and to himself, who was a great genealogist, excessively fond of talking of her family, and who most certainly, therefore, would have spoken of this descent if it were so. This is the substance of Mr. Potenger's valuable information, as it has been received and incorporated by Roscoe and others of the late writers on the life of Pope. Mr. Potenger, however, in one respect does some injustice to the Poet's memory. Mr. Pope nowhere says that he descended of an Earl of Downe, but only that he was of the same family as that from which the Earl of Downe sprang; which is quite a different thing, and probably true.