THE POPE MANSION AT BINFIELD. 17 Catholicism, was made a crime liable on conviction to a penalty of 1007. It is creditable to the national character that though our ancestors had the bigotry to pass such persecuting laws, they had not the cruelty to carry them into effect in the same spirit. The Catholics, however, were a proscribed class, and had to submit to popular contumely and insult, which were still further aggravated after the insurrection of 1715. No popular voice was raised in their favour. Bolingbroke was among the legislative persecutors, Garth subscribed money to burn effigies of the pope and cardinals, Swift's irony and indignation sought a different direction, and Pope consulted his ease and safety in silence. With "bated breath and whispering humbleness," the Papists held on their way, and such nurture was ill-suited to the formation of an erect and manly spirit in the poet of Windsor Forest. The favourite occupation of the elder Pope was his garden: 66 Plants, cauliflowers, and boasts to rear And his success was not inconsiderable; for Sir William Trumbull-a retired statesman, whose seat was about two miles distant-envied Mr. Pope's skill in gardening, and acknowledged that he could not grow such artichokes as those which the retired merchant of Binfield occasionally presented him with. The Pope mansion was described by the poet as "A little house, with trees a row, It has since been raised and transformed into a handsome villa residence. Two of the trees, noble elms, still remain at the gate of the house, and the poet's study has been preserved. On the lawn is a cypress-tree which Pope is said to have planted-a tradition common to all poetical residences. Milton has still an apple-tree at Horton and a mulberry-tree at Cambridge; and Shakspeare's mulberry-tree, with the story of its ruthless and Gothic destruction, has a fame almost as universal as his dramas. The enthusiasm of poetical admiration seeks for such tangible objects as seeming to give us an earthly hold on immortal minds, and invests them with the interest of holy relics. Part of the forest of Windsor now bears the name of Pope's Wood, and among those tall, spreading beeches with smooth, grey, fluted trunks, he first met the Muse, and "lisped in numbers."16 His country retirement and sylvan walks were highly important at this susceptible period of life in the formation of Pope's poetical character. He soon ceased to be a descriptive poet, and, with a weakness observable on other subjects, he depreciated what he did not adopt or prefer. Description was with him synonymous with imbecility; but the censure can only apply to weak versifiers and to bad description. No eminent poet of this class who has made nature his study confines himself wholly to external or inanimate phenomena. Thomson and Cowper link their descriptions to the natural emotions and finer sentiments of the heart, and to all the healthful and exhilarating occupations of rural life. They make the "world's tired denizens" breathe a fresher and purer existence; they connect with national or local scenes historical and patriotic events; or, taking a wider survey, they awaken those primary solemn and religious feelings with which men in all ages and countries have regarded the grander aspects of the visible universe. Pope's physical constitution, no doubt, helped to shape his mental habits; but it was fortunate that he had this early taste of the country. His recollections of Windsor Forest, and of the mornings and sunsets he had enjoyed within its broad circumference of shade, or from the "stately brow" of its historic heights, may be tracked like the fresh green of spring along the fiery course of his satire, and 16 "There was a particular beech-tree under which Pope used to sit, and it is the tradition of the place, that under that tree he composed the Windsor Forest. The original tree being decayed, Lady Gower of Bill-hill had a memorial carved upon the bark of another immediately adjoining: 'HERE POPE SUNG.' During Lady Gower's life the letters were new cut every three or four years."-Bowles, 1806. This tree was destroyed by a storm about thirty years since; but there is still a fine grove of beeches on the spot, which is elevated, and commands a rich and extensive view. There are no traditional accounts of Pope or of any of his friends extant about Binfield. The neighbourhood is a very changeable one, and no family, gentle or simple, has been there long enough to become the repository of any tradition of that period. through the mazes of his metaphysics. Milton, let us remember, was familiar with the same scenery. Horton is within sight of Windsor, and the great poet must often have listened to the echoes of the royal chase in the forest. In his five years of retirement at Horton-a paradisiacal lustrum of unbroken tranquillity and study-Milton composed his Lycidas and Comus, and, probably, his Allegro and Penseroso. There he inhaled that love of nature which never deserted him, even when he could see it only with that "inward eye" that told "Of things invisible to mortal sight." Pope excelled all his contemporaries, and led the public taste in graceful and picturesque landscape gardening. He had an exquisite eye for dressed nature, nature trimmed by Kent,17 the lawn, the grove, and parterre; the variety of perspective, the multiplied walks, and bounded wilderness. But Milton's description of the garden of Eden shows how well the epic bard had imbibed in youth, and intensely appreciated, that true taste which makes art the handmaid of nature. From his infancy Pope was considered a prodigy. He had inherited from his father a crooked body, and from his mother a sickly constitution, perpetually subject to severe headaches; and hence great care and tenderness were required in his nurture. His faithful nurse, Mary Beach, lived to see him a great man; and when she died, in 1725, the poet erected a stone over her grave, at Twickenham, to tell that Alexander Pope, whom she nursed in infancy, and affectionately attended for twenty-eight years, was grateful for her services. He had nearly lost his life when a child, from a wild cow that threw him down, and with her horns wounded him in the neck. He charmed all the household by his gentleness and sensibility, and, in consequence of the sweet 17 "Pleased let me own, in Esher's peaceful grove, William Kent [born 1685, died 1748] was considered by Walpole the inventor of modern gardening: "he leaped the sunk fence and saw that all nature was a garden." Pope both instructed and was instructed by Kent. ness of his voice, was called "the little nightingale." This distinction seems to have continued, for Lord Orrery mentions that "honest Tom Southern," the dramatist, used, in advanced life, to apply to him the same musical appellation. He was taught his letters by an old aunt, and he taught himself to write by copying from printed books. This art he also retained through life, and often practised with singular neatness and proficiency. Johnson remarks that his ordinary hand was not elegant. But this opinion must have been formed from a hasty survey of the Homer MSS. in the British Museum, which are carelessly written and crowded with interlineations. His letters to Henry Cromwell (the originals of many of which still exist), his letters to ladies and his inscriptions in books presented to his friends, are specimens of fine, clear, and scholar-like penmanship. Pope's first education was, as he informs Spence, " extremely loose and disconcerted." The family priest, named Banister, taught him the accidence and first parts of grammar by adopting the method followed in the Jesuits' schools of teaching the rudiments of Latin and Greek together. He then attended two little schools, at which he learned nothing. The first of these, according to Spence, was the Catholic seminary at Twyford, near Winchester, but it is as likely to have been at Twyford on the river Loddon, near Binfield. At Twyford he remained a twelvemonth, and wrote a lampoon on his master for some faults he had discovered in him -so early had he assumed the characters of critic and satirist. He was fogged for the offence, and his indulgent father, in resentment, took him away, and placed him in a London school. This was kept by Thomas Deane, one of King James's converts in Oxford, who had been a Fellow of University College, but declared "non-socius" after the Revolution. Deane was a vain, restless controversialist, and had stood in the pillory in 1691, under the name of Thomas Franks, for concealing the author of a libellous pamphlet against the Government. He is said to have been the author of" An Essay towards a Proposal for Catholic Communion," 1704, but this work seems above the pitch of his intellect. He was often in prison, and was all his life, as Pope said, “a POPE AT SCHOOL IN LONDON. 21 dupe to some project or other." 18 Deane had a school first at Marylebone, and afterwards at Hyde Park-corner, at both of which Pope was under his charge. "I began writing verses," he says, "farther back than I can well remember." Ogilby's translation of Homer was one of the first large poems he read, and, in after life, he spoke of the rapture it afforded him. "I was then about eight years old. This led me to Sandys's Ovid, which I liked extremely, and so I did a translation of part of Statius by some very bad hand. When I was about twelve, I wrote a kind of play, which I got to be acted by my schoolfellows. It was a number of speeches from the Iliad tacked together with verses of my own." Ruffhead says the part of Ajax was performed by the master's gardener, who certainly would look the character, however the poetry might suffer, better than his juvenile associates. Mr. Deane was a careless, remiss teacher, and what with studying plays and making verses, and attending the theatre in company with the older boys, Pope made so little progress, that on leaving school he was only able, he says, to construe a little of Tully's Offices. He was better acquainted with Dryden than with Cicero, and his boyish admiration and curiosity led him to obtain a sight of the living poet. He prevailed upon a friend, according to Warburton, to accompany him to town and introduce him to Will's coffee-house, the famous resort of wits, authors, actors, and play-goers, in Bow-street. Mr. Roscoe conjectured that the friend alluded to was Sir Charles Wogan, who, in a letter to Swift, boasts that he had the honour of bringing Mr. Pope from his retreat in the Forest, to "dress à la mode and introduce at Will's coffee-house." Now, Pope was only twelve years of age when 18 Athenæum, July 15, 1854. Pope, in 1727, when Deane was again in prison, kindly offered to contribute towards a small yearly pension to his old master. A correspondent of Curll's, "E. P." gives an account, as from personal knowledge, of Pope having, before his twelfth year, attended a school in Devonshire-street, near Bloomsbury, taught by another convert to Popery, William Bromley. The incident of the satire and the whipping is transferred to this school. (Pope's Lit. Corresp., v. ii.) The narrative, we suspect, is fabulous-another of Pope's tricks on Curll. The importance of the poet is always kept up. The "late Duke of Norfolk" was at the Devonshire school along with "Mr. Alexander Pope." |