"_Virgilium tantum vidi!_" Pope said this of Dryden, whom he once saw when a boy. He was wont to say of Betterton, that he had known him from his own boyhood upwards, till the actor died, in 1710, when the poet was twenty-two years of age. The latter listened eagerly to the old traditions which the player narrated of the earlier times. Betterton was warrant to him, on the authority of Davenant, from whom the actor had it, that there was no foundation for the old legend which told of an ungenerous rivalry between Shakspeare and Old Ben. The player who had been as fearless with Dryden as Socrates was with his friend Euripides--"judiciously lopping" redundant nonsense or false and mean maxims, as Dryden himself confesses--was counsellor, rather than critic or censor, with young Pope. The latter, at the age of twelve years, had written the greater portion of an imitative epic poem, entitled _Alcander, Prince of Rhodes_. I commend to artists in search of a subject the incident of Pope, at fifteen or sixteen, showing this early effort of his Muse to Betterton. It was a poem which abounded in dashing exaggerations, and fair imitations of the styles of the then greater English poets. There was a dramatic vein about it, however, or the player would not have advised the bard to convert his poem into a play. The lad excused himself. He feared encountering either the law of the drama or the taste of the town; and Betterton left him to his own unfettered way. The actor lived to see that the boy was the better judge of his own powers, for young Pope produced his _Essay on Criticism_ the year before Betterton died. A few years later the poet rendered any possible fulfilment of the player's counsel impossible, by dropping the manuscript of _Alcander_ into the flames. Atterbury had less esteem for this work than Betterton. "I am not sorry your _Alcander_ is burnt," he says; "but had I known your intentions I would have interceded for the first page, and put it, with your leave, among my curiosities."