Of gentle blood (part shed in honour’s cause,
  While yet in Britain, honour had applause)
  Each parent sprang,—­What fortune pray?—­their own,
  And better got than Bestia’s from the throne. 
  Born to no pride, inheriting no strife,
  Nor marrying discord in a noble wife;
  Stranger to civil and religious rage,
  The good man walked innoxious thro’ his age: 
  No courts he saw; no suits would ever try;
  Nor dar’d an oath, nor hazarded a lye: 
  Unlearn’d, he knew no schoolmen’s subtle art,
  No language, but the language of the heart: 
  By nature honest, by experience wise,
  Healthy by temp’rance, and by exercise;
  His life though long, to sickness past unknown,
  His death was instant and without a groan.

The education of our great author was attended with circumstances very singular; and some of them extremely unfavourable; but the amazing force of his genius fully compensated the want of any advantage in his earliest instruction.  He owed the knowledge of his letters to an aunt; and having learned very early to read, took great delight in it, and taught himself to write by copying after printed books, the characters of which he could imitate to great perfection.  He began to compose verses, farther back than he could well remember; and at eight years of age, when he was put under one Taverner a priest, who taught him the rudiments of the Latin and Greek tongues at the same time, he met with Ogilby’s Homer, which gave him great delight; and this was encreased by Sandys’s Ovid:  The raptures which these authors, even in the disguise of such translations, then yielded him, were so strong, that he spoke of them with pleasure ever after.  From Mr. Taverner’s tuition he was sent to a private school at Twiford, near Winchester, where he continued about a year, and was then removed to another near Hyde Park Corner; but was so unfortunate as to lose under his two last masters, what he had acquired under the first.

While he remained at this school, being permitted to go to the play-house, with some of his school fellows of a more advanced age, he was so charmed with dramatic representations, that he formed the translation of the Iliad into a play, from several of the speeches in Ogilby’s translation, connected with verses of his own; and the several parts were performed by the upper boys of the school, except that of Ajax by the master’s gardener.  At the age of 12 our young poet, went with his father to reside at his house at Binfield, in Windsor forest, where he was for a few months under the tuition of another priest, with as little success as before; so that he resolved now to become his own master, by reading those Classic Writers which gave him most entertainment; and by this method, at fifteen he gained a ready habit in the learned languages, to which he soon after added the French and Italian.  Upon his retreat to the forest, he became first acquainted with the writings of Waller, Spenser and Dryden; in the last of which he immediately found what he wanted; and the poems of that excellent writer were never out of his hands; they became his model, and from them alone he learned the whole magic of his versification.