Alexander was an only son.  He had one step-sister, but she was a good many years older than he, and he seems never to have had any child companions or real childhood.  He must always have been delicate, yet as a child his face was “round, plump, pretty, and of a fresh complexion."* He is said, too, to have been very sweet tempered, but his father and mother spoilt him not a little, and when he grew up he lost that sweetness of temper.  Yet, unlike many spoilt children, Pope never forgot the reverence due to father and mother.  He repaid their love with love as warm, and in their old age he tended and cared for them fondly.

Spence, Anecdotes.

As Pope was a delicate boy he got little regular schooling.  He learned to write by copying the printed letters in books, and was first taught to read by an aunt, and later by a priest, but still at home.  After a time he was at school for a few years, but he went from one school to another, never staying long at any, and so never learning much.  He says indeed that he unlearned at two of his schools all that he had learned at another.  By the time he was twelve he was once more at home reading what he liked and learning what he liked, and he read and studied so greedily that he made himself ill.

Pope loved the stories of the Greek and Roman heroes, but he did not care for the hard work needed to learn to read them in the original with ease, and contented himself with translations.  He was so fond of these stories that while still a little boy he made a play from the Iliad which was acted by the boys of one of his schools.

Very early Pope began to write poetry.  He read a great deal, and two of his favorite poets were Spenser and Dryden.  His great idea was to become a poet also, and in this his father encouraged him.  Although no poet himself he would set his little son to make verses upon different subjects.  “He was pretty difficult in being pleased,” says Pope’s mother, “and used often to send him back to new turn them; ‘These are not good rhymes,’ he would say.”

There is a story told that Pope admired Dryden’s poetry so much that he persuaded a friend to take him one day to London, to the coffee-house where Dryden used to hold his little court.  There he saw the great man, who spoke to him and gave him a shilling for some verses he wrote.  But the story is a very doubtful one, as Dryden died when Pope was twelve years old, and for some time before that he had been too ill to go to coffee-houses.  But that Pope’s admiration for Dryden was very sincere and very great we know, for he chose him as his model.  Like Dryden, Pope wrote in the heroic couplet, and in his hands it became much more neat and polished than ever it did in the hands of the older poet.