My own researches have done something to enable me to extend the very limited information we possess on this subject: not much, perhaps, it will be thought, but it will be sound as far as it goes, and will be presented in the simple guise of truth, with no intention of unduly magnifying or unfairly weakening the claim set up by the Poet himself. He having made the claim to be "of gentle blood," beside the interest which belongs to the question as part of the Poet's history, his truthfulness and honour may be said to be involved in it, points of even more importance than his wonderful moral sagacity, and the unrivalled felicity of his numbers. I treat of the two families apart. I. THE POPES. Alexander Pope, the Poet's father, if he was seventy-four or seventy-five at the time of his death in 1717, may be presumed to have been born in 1641 or 1642. He was a younger son, and is said by P. T. to have been a posthumous child, and that while his elder brother, who inherited the larger share of the family property, was sent to Oxford, where he died, he was brought up to commerce. It has never been shown by whom this arrangement was made, for before his birth, his father (of whom afterwards), according to the letter to Curl, was dead: and if not dead, he died when his son was quite an infant. All accounts agree that he was sent abroad to complete his mercantile education--an expensive course, which of itself shows that he was of no very mean stock, and that, though the younger son of a widow, his relatives had the means of giving him a fair start in life. There are, as we have seen, two opposing accounts from persons who professed to know the facts respecting the place to which he was sent, one stating it to be Flanders, the other, with more of probability, Lisbon, with the additional information, that at Lisbon he joined the Roman Catholic Church, or that there, at least, was laid the foundation of the change in his religious profession. From that time there is a blank in his history till his thirty-fifth year, 1677, when he was living in Broad Street, London, where many of the principal merchants of the time resided or carried on their business. This we learn from a 12mo volume, printed for Samuel Lee in that year, entitled _A Collection of the Names of the Merchants living in and about the City of London_. Books of this kind are of some rarity, being by most persons thought worthless and are destroyed, when superseded by others of a later date. I have a copy which has survived the general wreck, and has been long in my possession. I copy from it the names of three Popes who occur in the list:-- JAMES POPE, Abchurch Lane. ALEXANDER POPE, Broad Street. JOSEPH POPE, Redriff.