“I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.”

At the age of twelve, he was taken to Will’s Coffee-house, to see the great Dryden, upon whom, as a model, he had already determined to fashion himself.

His first efforts were translations.  He made English versions of the first book of the Thebais of Statius; several of the stories of Chaucer, and one of Ovid’s Epistles, all of which were produced before he was fifteen.

ESSAY ON CRITICISM.—­He was not quite twenty-one when he wrote his Essay on Criticism, in which he lays down the canons of just criticism, and the causes which prevent it.  In illustration, he attacks the multitude of critics of that day, and is particularly harsh in his handling of a few among them.  He gained a name by this excellent poem, but he made many enemies, and among them one John Dennis, whom he had satirized under the name of Appius.  Dennis was his life-long foe.

Perhaps there is no better proof of the lasting and deserved popularity of this Essay, than the numerous quotations from it, not only in works on rhetoric and literary criticism, but in our ordinary intercourse with men.  Couplets and lines have become household words wherever the English language is spoken.  How often do we hear the sciolist condemned in these words: 

    A little learning is a dangerous thing;
    Drink deep, or touch not the Pierian spring?

Irreverence and rash speculation are satirized thus: 

    Nay, fly to altars; there they’ll talk you dead,
    For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

We may waive a special notice of his Pastorals, which, like those of Dryden, are but clever imitations of Theocritus and anachronisms of the Alexandrian period.  Of their merits, we may judge from his own words.  “If they have any merit, it is to be attributed to some good old authors, whose works as I had leisure to study, so I hope I have not wanted care to imitate.”

RAPE OF THE LOCK.—­The poem which displays most originality of invention is the Rape of the Lock.  It is, perhaps, the best and most charming specimen of the mock-heroic to be found in English; and it is specially deserving of attention, because it depicts the social life of the period in one of its principal phases.  Miss Arabella Fermor, one of the reigning beauties of London society, while on a pleasure party on the Thames, had a lock of her hair surreptitiously cut off by Lord Petre.  Although it was designed as a joke, the belle was very angry; and Pope, who was a friend of both persons, wrote this poem to assuage her wrath and to reconcile them.  It has all the system and construction of an epic.  The poet describes, with becoming delicacy, the toilet of the lady, at which she is attended by obsequious sylphs.

The party embark upon the river, and the fair lady is described in the splendor of her charms: 

This nymph, to the destruction of mankind,
Nourished two locks, which graceful hung behind
In equal curls, and well conspired to deck,
With shining ringlets, the smooth, ivory neck.